I 



THE PRIVATE LIFE OF 
HENRY MAITLAND 



fr^' 



THE PRIVATE LIFE OF 

HENRY MAITLAND 

A RECORD DICTATED BY J. H. 



REVISED AND EDITED BY 

MORLEY ROBERTS 






HODDER & STOUGHTON 

NEW YORK 

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



T? 4-7/7 



Copyright, 1912, 
By George H. Doran Company 



©CI,A330487 



INSCRIBED 
TO THE MEMORY OF 

MY WIFE 



PREFACE 

This book was dictated by J. H. mostly in my 
presence, and I consider it well worth publish- 
ing. No doubt Henry Maitland is not famous, 
though since his death much has been written of 
him. Most of it, however, outside of literary 
criticism, has been futile and uninstructed. But 
J. H. really knew the man, and here is what he 
has said of him. We shall be told, no doubt, 
that we have used Maitland's memory for our 
own ends. Let that be as it may; such an accu- 
sation can only be met by denial. When there is 
no proof of guilt, there may well be none of in- 
nocence. The fact remains that Henry Mait- 
land's life was worth doing, even in the abbrevi- 
ated and censored form in which it now appears. 
The man was not eminent, only because he was 
not popular and did not live long enough. One 
gets to eminence nowadays by longevity or by 
bad work. While Maitland starved, X or Y or 
Z may wallow in a million sixpences. In this 
almost childishly simple account of a man's life 
there is the essence of our literary epoch. Here 

is a writing man put down, crudely it may be, 

1 



8 PREFACE 

but with a certain power. There is no book 
quite like it in the English tongue, and the critic 
may take what advantage he will of that open- 
ing for his wit. 

At any rate here we have a portrait emerging 
which is real. Henry Maitland stands on his 
feet, and on his living feet. He is not a British 
statue done in the best mortuary manner. There 
is far too little sincere biography in English. 
We are a mealy-mouthed race, hypocrites by 
the grave and the monument. Ten words of 
natural eulogy, and another ten of curious, and 
sympathetic comment, may be better than tons 
of marble built up by a hired liar with his 
tongue in his cheek. In the whole book, which 
cannot be published now, there are things worth 
waiting for. I have cut and retrenched with 
pain, for I wanted to risk the whole, but no 
writer or editor is his own master in England. 
I am content to have omitted some truth if I 
have permitted nothing false. The reader who 
can say truly, ^^I should not have liked to meet 
Henry Maitland," is a fool or a fanatic, or more 
probably both. Neither of those who are pri- 
marily responsible for this little book is answer- 
able to such. We do not desire his praise, or 
even his mere allowance. Such as are inter- 
ested in the art of letters, and in those who prac- 
tise in the High Court of Literature, will per- 



PREFACE 9 

ceive what we had in our minds. Here is life, 
not a story or a constructed diary, and the art 
with which it is done is a secondary matter. If 
Henry Maitland bleeds and howls, so did 
Philoctetes, and the outcry of Henry Maitland 
is more pertinent to our lives. For all life, even 
at its best, is tragic; and there is much in Mait- 
land's which is dramatically common to our 
world as we see it and live in it. If we have 
lessened him at times from the point of view of 
a hireling in biographic praise, we have set him 
down life size all the same; and as we ask no 
praise, we care for no blame. Here is the man. 

MoRLEY Roberts. 

Note. — ^The full manuscript, which may pos- 
sibly be published after some years, is, in the 
meantime placed in safe custody. 



THE PRIVATE LIFE OF 
HENRY MAITLAND 



THE PRIVATE LIFE OF 
HENRY MAITLAND 

CHAPTER I 

IT is never an easy thing to write the life, or 
even such a sketch as I propose making, of 
a friend whom one knew well, and in 
Henry Maitland's case it is most uncommonly 
difficult. The usual biographer is content with 
writing panegyric, and as he must depend for 
his material, and even sometimes for his even- 
tual remuneration, on the relatives of his sub- 
ject, he is from the start in a hopeless position, 
except, it may be, as regards the public side of 
the life in question. But in the case of a man 
of letters the personal element is the only real 
and valuable one, or so it seems to me, and even 
if I were totally ignorant of Maitland's work I 
think it would yet be possible for me to do a 
somewhat lifelike and live sketch of him. I be- 
lieve, moreover, that it is my duty to do it, 
although no doubt in some ways it must be pain- 
ful to those connected with him. Yet soon after 

13 



14 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

his death many came to me desiring me to write 
his biography. It was an understood thing that 
of all his friends I knew him best, and was cer- 
tainly the greatest and chief authority on his 
career from the Moorhampton College days up 
to his final break with his second wife. But in 
1904 there were many obstacles to my doing this 
work. His two sons were young. His sisters 
and his mother were still alive. I say nothing 
of the wife herself, then being taken care of, or 
of a third lady of whom I must speak presently. 
Several people came to me with proposals about 
a book on Henry Maitland. One of the part- 
ners of a big publishing house made me a defi- 
nite offer for it on behalf of his firm. On the 
other hand one of his executors. Miss Kingdon, 
a most kindly and amiable and very able woman 
employed in a great accountant's office in the 
city, who had done very much for Henry Mait- 
land in his later life, begged me not to do the 
book, or if I did it to hold it over until her re- 
sponsibilities as executrix and trustee for the 
sons were at an end. But it is now nearly nine 
years since he died, and I feel that if I do not 
put down at once what I knew of him it never 
will be written, and something will be lost, 
something which has perhaps a little value, even 
though it is not so great as those could wish who 
knew and loved Henry Maitland. 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 15 

There is no doubt many people will accuse me 
of desiring to use his memory for my own ad- 
vantage. ^'My withers are unwrung." Those 
who speak in this way must have little knowl- 
edge of the poor profit to be derived from writ- 
ing such a book, and the proportion of that 
profit to the labour employed in it. On three 
separate occasions I spoke to Maitland about 
writing his biography, and it was an understood 
thing between us that if he died before me I was 
to write his life and tell the whole and absolute 
truth about him. This he gave me the most 
definite permission to do. I believe he felt that 
it might in some ways be of service to humanity 
for such a book to be written. Only the other 
day, when I wrote to Miss Kingdon concerning 
the biography, she answered me: "If I seem 
lacking in cordiality in this matter do not at- 
tribute it to any want of sympathy with you. I 
am not attempting to dissuade you. Henry 
Maitland was sent into hell for the purpose of 
saving souls ; perhaps it is a necessary thing that 
his story should be written by all sorts of people 
from their different points of view." Once I 
proposed to him to use his character and career 
as the chief figure in a long story. He wrote to 
me, "By all means. Why not?" Had I not the 
letter in which he said this I should myself al- 
most doubt my own recollection, but it is certain 



16 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

that he knew the value of his own experience, 
and felt that he might perhaps by his example 
save some from suffering as he did. 

No doubt very much that I say of him will 
not be true to others. To myself it is true at 
any rate. We know very little of each other, 
and after all it is perhaps in biography that one 
is most acutely conscious of the truth in the 
pragmatic view of truth. Those things are true 
in Henry Maitland's life and character which 
fit in wholly with all my experience of him and 
make a coherent and likely theory. I used to 
think I knew him very well, and yet when I 
remember and reflect it seems to me that I know 
exceedingly little about him. And yet again, I 
am certain that of the two people in the world 
that I was best acquainted with he was one. 
We go through life believing that we know 
many, but if we sit down and attempt to draw 
them we find here and there unrelated facts and 
many vague incoherencies. We are in a fog 
about our very dear friend whom but yesterday 
we were ready to judge and criticise with an air 
of final knowledge. There is something hu- 
miliating in this, and yet how should we, who 
know so little of ourselves, know even those we 
love? To my mind, with all his weaknesses, 
which I shall not extenuate, Maitland was a 
noble and notable character, and if anything I 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 17 

should write may endure but a little while it is 
because there is really something of him in my 
words. I am far more concerned to write about 
Henry Maitland for those who loved him than 
for those who loved him not, and I shall be 
much better pleased if what I do about him 
takes the shape of an impression rather than of 
anything like an ordinary biography. Every 
important and unimportant political fool who 
dies nowadays is buried under obituary notices 
and a mausoleum in two volumes — a mausoleum 
which is, as a rule, about as high a work of art 
as the angels on tombstones in an early Vic- 
torian cemetery. But Maitland, I think, de- 
serves, if not a better, a more sympathetic 
tribute. 

When I left Radford Grammar School my 
father, being in the Civil Service, was sent to 
Moorhampton as Surveyor of Taxes, and his 
family shortly followed him. I continued my 
own education at Moorhampton College, which 
was then beginning to earn a high reputation as 
an educational centre. Some months before I 
met Maitland personally I knew his reputation 
was that of an extraordinary young scholar. 
Even as a boy of sixteen he swept everything be- 
fore him. There was nobody in the place who 
could touch him at classical learning, and every- 
body prophesied the very greatest future for the 



18 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

boy. I met him first in a little hotel not very 
far from the College where some of us young 
fellows used to go between the intervals of lec- 
tures to play a game of billiards. I remember 
quite well seeing him sit on a little table swing- 
ing his legs, and to this day I can remember 
somewhat of the impression he made upon me. 
He was curiously bright, with a very mobile 
face. He had abundant masses of brown hair 
combed backwards over his head, grey-blue 
eyes, a very sympathetic mouth, an extraor- 
dinarily well-shaped chin — although perhaps 
both mouth and chin were a little weak — and a 
great capacity for talking and laughing. 

Henceforth he and I became very firm friends 
at the College, although we belonged to two en- 
tirely different sets. I was supposed to be an 
extraordinarily rowdy person, and was always 
getting into trouble both with the authorities 
and with my fellows, and he was a man who 
I loathed anything like rowdiness, could not fight 
: if he tried, objected even then to the Empire, 
; hated patriotism, and thought about nothing but 
ancient Greece and Rome, or so it would appear 
to those who knew him at that time. 

I learnt then a little of his early history. 
Even when he was but a boy of ten or eleven he 
was recognised as a creature of most brilliant 
promise. He always believed that he owed 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 19 

most, and perhaps everything, to his father, who 
must have been a very remarkable man. Henry 
never spoke about him in later life w^ithout 
emotion and affection. I have often thought 
since that Maitland felt that most of his disasters 
sprang from the premature death of his father, 
whom he loved so tenderly. Indeed the elder 
man must have been a remarkable figure, a gen- 
tle, courtly, and most kindly man, himself born 
in exile and placed in alien circumstances. 
Maitland often used to speak, with a catch in 
his voice, of the way his father read to him. I 
remember not what books, but they were 
the classic authors of England; Shakespeare, 
Wordsworth, and Tennyson. Some seem to 
imagine that the father had what is called a 
well-stocked library. This was not true, but he 
had many good books and taught his son to love 
them. Among these there was one great vol- 
ume of Hogarth's drawings which came into 
Henry Maitland's personal possession, only, I 
think, when he was finally domiciled in a Lon- 
don flat, where he and I often looked at it. It 
is curious that as a boy Hogarth had a fascina- 
tion for him. He sometimes copied these draw- 
ings, for as a child he had no little skill as a 
draughtsman. What appealed to him in later 
days in Hogarth was the power of the man's 
satire, his painful bitterness, which can only be 



m> THE PRIVATE LIFE 

equalled by the ironies of Swift in another me- 
dium. Although personally I admire Hogarth 
I could never look at him with anything like 
pleasure or, indeed, without acute discomfort. 
I remember that Maitland in later years said in 
his book about the Victorian novelist: "With 
these faces who would spend hours of leisure? 
Hogarth copied in the strict sense of the word. 
He gives us life and we cannot bear it." 

Maitland's family came, I think, from Wor- 
cester, but something led the elder Maitland to 
Mirefield's, and there he came in contact with 
a chemist called Lake, whose business he pres- 
ently bought. Perhaps the elder Maitland was 
not a wholly happy man. He was very gentle, 
but not a person of marked religious feeling. 
Indeed I think the attitude of the family at that 
time was that of free thought. From every- 
thing that Henry said of his father it always 
seemed to me that the man had been an alien in 
the cold Yorkshire town where his son was born. 
And Maitland knew that had his father lived he 
would never have been thrown alone into the 
great city of Moorhampton, "Lord of himself, 
that heritage of woe." Not all women under- 
stand the dangers that their sons may meet in 
such surroundings, and those who had charge 
of Henry Maitland's future never understood 
or recognized them in his youth. But his father 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 21 

would have known. In one chapter of "The 
Vortex/' there is very much of Maitland. It is 
a curiously wrought picture of a father and his 
son in which he himself played alternately the 
part of father and child. I knew his anxieties 
for his own children, and on reading that chap- 
ter one sees them renewed. But in it there 
was much that was not himself. It was drawn 
rather from what he believed his father had felt. 
In "The Vortex" the little boy spends an hour 
alone with his father just before bedtime, and 
he calls it "A golden hour, sacred to memories 
of the world's own childhood." 

Maitland went to school in Mirefields and 
this school has been called a kind of "Dotheboys 
Hall," which of course is absolutely ridiculous. 
It was not, in fact, a boarding-school at all, but 
a day school. The man who ran it was called 
Hinkson. Maitland said he was an uneducated 
man, or at any rate uneducated from his point 
of view in later years, yet he was a person of very 
remarkable character, and did very good work, 
taking it all round. A man named Christopher 
started this school and sold it to Hinkson, who 
had, I believe, some kind of a degree obtained 
at Durham. The boys who attended it were 
good middle class and lower middle class, some 
the sons of professional men, some the offspring 
of the richer tradesmen. Upon the whole it 



22 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

was a remarkably good school for that time. 
Many of the boys actually left the Grammar 
School at Mirefields to attend it. Henry Mait- 
land always owned that Hinkson took great 
pains with his scholars, and affirmed that many 
owed him much. As I said, the general re- 
ligious air of Maitland's home at that time was 
one of free thought. I believe the feminine 
members of the family attended a Unitarian 
Church, but the father did not go to church at 
all. One example of this religious attitude of 
his home came out when Hinkson called on his 
boys to repeat the collect of the day and Mait- 
land replied with an abrupt negative that they 
did not do that kind of thing at home. Where- 
upon Hinkson promptly set him to acquire it, 
saying sternly that it would do him no harm. 

For the most part in those early days the elder 
Maitland and his son spent Sunday afternoon in 
the garden belonging to their Mirefields house. 
Oddly enough this garden was not attached to 
the dwelling but was a kind of allotment. It 
has been photographically reproduced by 
Henry Maitland in the seventh chapter of the 
first volume of ^^Morning." Very often Henry 
Maitland's father read to him in that garden. 

One of Maitland's schoolfellows at Hink- 
son's school was the son of the man from whom 
his father had bought the druggist's business. 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 23 

The elder Lake was a friend of Barry Sullivan, 
and theatrically mad. He started plays in 
which Henry always took some part, though not 
the prominent part which has been attributed to 
him by some. Nevertheless he was always in- 
terested in plays and had a very dramatic way 
of reading anything that was capable of dra- 
matic interpretation. He always loved the 
sound of words, and even when he was a boy of 
about twelve he took down a German book and 
read some of it aloud to the younger Lake, who 
did not know German and said so. Whereupon 
Maitland shook his fist at him and said: '^But 
Lake, listen, listen, listen — doesn't it sound 
fine?" This endured through all his life. At 
this same time he used to read Oliver Wendell 
Holmes aloud to some of the other boys. This 
was when he was thirteen. Even then he 
always mouthed the words and loved their 
rhythm. 

Naturally enough, his father being a poor 
man, there would have been no opportunity of 
Henry Maitland's going to Moorhampton and 
to its great college if he had not obtained some 
scholarship. This, I think, was the notion that 
his father had at the time, and the necessity for 
it became more imperative when his father died. 
He did obtain this scholarship when he was 
somewhere about sixteen, and immediately 



24 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

afterwards was sent over to Moorhampton quite 
alone and put into lodgings there. At his 
school in Mirefields he had taken every possible 
prize, and I think it was two exhibitions from 
the London University which enabled him to go 
to Moorhampton. The college was a curious 
institution, one of the earliest endeavours to cre- 
ate a kind of university centre in a great pro- 
vincial city. We certainly had a very wonder- 
ful staff there, especially on the scientific side. 
Among the men of science at the college were 
Sir Henry Bissell; Schorstein, the great chem- 
ist; Hahn, also a chemist, and Balfour, the 
physicist. On the classical side were Professor 
Little and Professor Henry Parker, who were 
not by any means so eminent as their scientific 
colleagues. The eminence of our scientific pro- 
fessors did not matter very much from Henry 
Maitland's point of view, perhaps, for from the 
day of his birth to the day of his death, he took 
no interest whatever in science and loathed all 
forms of speculative thought with a peculiar 
and almost amusing horror. Mathematics he 
detested, and if in later years I ever attempted 
to touch upon metaphysical questions he used to 
shut up, to use an American phrase, just like a 
clam. But on the classical side he was much 
more than merely successful. He took every 
: possible prize that was open to him. In his 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 25 

book 'The Exile/' there is a picture of a youth 
on prize day going up to receive prize after 
prize, and I know that this chapter contains 
much of what he himself must have felt when I 
saw him retire to a modest back bench loaded 
with books bound in calf and tooled in gold. 

Of course a college of this description, which 
was not, properly speaking, a university, could 
only be regarded, for a boy of his culture, as a 
stepping-stone to one of the older universities, 
probably Cambridge, since most of my own 
friends who did go to the university went there 
from Moorhampton. I do not think there was 
a professor or lecturer or a single student in the 
college who did not anticipate for Henry Mait- 
land one of the brightest possible futures, so 
far as success at the university could make it so. 
It is possible that I alone out of those who re- 
garded him with admiration and affection had 
some doubt of this, and that was not because I 
disagreed as a boy with any of the estimates that 
had been formed of him, but simply because for 
some reason or another he chose me as a confi- 
dant. Many years afterwards he said to me 
with painful bitterness: "It was a cruel and 
most undesirable thing that I, at the age of six- 
teen, should have been turned loose in a big city, 
compelled to live alone in lodgings, with no- 
body interested in me but those at the college. 



26 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

I see now that one of my sisters should certainly 
have been sent with me to Moorhampton.'' 

One day he showed me a photograph. It was 
that of a young girl, aged perhaps seventeen — 
he at the time being very little more — with her 
hair down her back. She was not beautiful, but 
she had a certain prettiness, the mere prettiness 
of youth, and she was undoubtedly not a lady. 
After some interrogation on my part he told me 
that she was a young prostitute whom he knew, 
and I do not think I am exaggerating my own 
feelings when I say that I recognised instinc- 
tively and at once that if his relations with her 
were not put an end to some kind of disaster was 
in front of him. It was not that I knew very 
much about life, for what could a boy of less 
than eighteen really know about it? — but I had 
some kind of instinctive sense in me, and I was 
perfectly aware, even then, that Henry Mait- 
Jand had about as little savoir-vivre as anybody 
' I had ever met up to that time, or anybody I 
could ever expect to meet. It may seem strange 
to some that even at that time I had no moral 
views, and extremely little religion, although I 
may say incidentally that I thought about it suf- 
ficiently to become deliberately a Unitarian, re- 
fusing to be confirmed in the English Church, 
very much to the rage of the parish clergyman, 
and with the result of much friction with my 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 27 

father. Yet although I had no moral views I[, 
did my best to get Maitland to give up this girl,if 
but he v^ould not do it. The thing went on, so ) 
far as I am aware, for the best part of a year. 
He did all he could, apparently, to get Marian 
Hilton to leave the streets. He even bought a 
sewing machine and gave it to her with this 
view. That was another sample of his early 
idealism. 

This was in 1876, and the younger Lake, who 
was three years older than Maitland, had by: 
then just qualified as a doctor. He was an as-i 
sistant at Darwen and one day went over to! 
Moorhampton to see Henry, who told him what 
he had told me about this Marian Hilton. He 
even went so far as to say that he was going to 
marry her. Dr. Lake, of course, being an older 
man, and knowing something of life through his 
own profession, did not approve of this and 
strongly objected. Afterwards he regretted a 
thousand times that he had not written direct to 
Maitland's people to tell them of what was go- 
ing on. Still, although he was the older man, 
he was not so much older as to have got rid of 
the boyish loyalty of one youth to another, and 
he did not do what he knew he ought to have 
done. He found out that Maitland had even 
sold his father's watch to help this girl. This 
affair was also known to a young accountant who 



28 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

came from Mirefields whom I did not know, 
and also to another man at the college who is 
now in the Government Service. So far as I 
remember the accountant was not a good influ- 
ence, but his other friend did what he could to 
get Maitland to break off this very undesirable 
relationship, with no more success than myself. 
I have never understood how it was that he 
got into such frightful financial difficulties. I 
can only imagine that Marian must have had, in 
one way or another, the greater portion of the 
income which he got from the scholarships he 
held. I do know that his affection for her 
seemed at this time to be very sincere. And out 
of that affection there grew up, very naturally, 
a horror in his sensitive mind for the life this 
poor child was leading. He haunted the streets 
which she haunted, and sometimes saw her with 
other men. I suppose even then she must have 
been frightfully extravagant, and perhaps given 
to drink, but considering what his income was I 
think he should have been able to give her a 
pound a week if necessary, and yet have had suf- 
ficient to live on without great difficulty. 
Nevertheless he did get into difficulties, and 
never even spoke to me about it. I was quite 
aware, in a kind of dim way, that he was in 
trouble and looked very ill, but he did not give 
me his fullest confidence, although one day he 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 29 

told me, as he had told Lake, that he proposed 
marrying her. I was only a boy, but I was ab- 
solutely enraged at the notion and used every 
possible means to prevent him committing such 
an absurd act of folly. When I met him I dis- 
cussed it with hirn. When I was away from 
him I wrote him letters. I suppose I wrote him 
a dozen letters begging that he would do no such 
foolish thing. I told him that he would wrong 
himself, and could do the girl no possible good. 
My instincts told me even then that she would, 
instead of being raised, pull him down. These 
letters of mine were afterwards discovered in 
his rooms when the tragedy had happened. 

During that time in 1876, we students at 
Moorhampton College were much disturbed by 
a series of thefts in the common room, and from 
a locker room in which we kept our books and 
papers and our overcoats. Books disappeared 
unaccountably and so did coats. Money was 
taken from the pockets of coats left in the room, 
and nobody knew who was to blame for this. 
Naturally enough we suspected a porter or one 
of the lower staff, but we were wrong. With- 
out our knowledge the college authorities set a 
detective to discover who was to blame. One 
day I went into the common room, and standing 
in front of the fire found a man, a young fellow 
about my age, called Sarle, with whom I 



30 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

frequently played chess — he was afterwards 
president of the chess club at Oxford — and he 
said to me: ''Have you heard the news?" 
''What news?" I asked. "Your friend, Henry 
Maitland, has been stealing those things that we 
have lost," he said. And when he said it I very 
nearly struck him, for it seemed a gross and in- 
credible slander. But unfortunately it was 
true, and at that very moment Maitland was in 
gaol. A detective had hidden himself in the 
small room leading out of the bigger room 
where the lockers were and had caught him in 
the act. It was a very ghastly business and cer- 
tainly the first great shock I ever got in my life. 
I think it was the same for everybody who knew 
the boy. The whole college was in a most ex- 
traordinary ferment, and, indeed, I may say the 
whole of Moorhampton which took any real in- 
terest in the college. 

Professor Little, who was then the head of the 
college, sent for me and asked me what I knew 
of the matter. I soon discovered that this was 
because the police had found letters from me in 
Maitland's room which referred to Marian Hil- 
ton. I told the professor with the utmost frank- 
ness everything that I knew about the affair, and 
maintained that I had done my utmost to get 
him to break with her, a statement which all my 
letters supported. I have often imagined a cer- 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 31 

tain suspicion, in the minds of some of those who 
are given to suspicion, that I myself had been 
leading the same kind of life as Henry Mait- 
land. This was certainly not true; but I be- 
lieve that one or two of those who did not like 
me — and there are always some — threw out 
hints that I knew Maitland had been taking 
these things. Yet after my very painful inter- 
view with Professor Little, who was a very de- 
lightful and kindly personality — though cer- 
tainly not so strong a man as the head of such an 
institution should be — I saw that he gave me 
every credit for what I had tried to do. Among 
my own friends at the college was a young fel- 
low, Edward Wolff, the son of the Rev. Mr. 
Wolff, the Unitarian minister at the chapel in 
Broad Street. Edward was afterwards fifth 
wrangler of his year at Cambridge. He got his 
father to interest himself in Henry Maitland's 
future. Mr. Wolff and several other men of 
some eminence in the city did what they could 
for him. They got together a little money and 
on his release from prison sent him away to 
America. He was met on coming out of prison 
by Dr. Lake's father, who also helped him in 
every possible way. 

It seemed to me then that I had probably seen 
the last of Maitland, and the turn my own career 
took shortly afterwards rendered this even more 



32 HENRY MAITLAND 

likely. In the middle of 1876 I had a very seri- 
ous disagreement with my father, who was a 
man of great ability but very violent temper, 
and left home. On September 23 of that year I 
sailed for Australia and remained there, work- 
ing mostly in the bush, for the best part of three 
years. During all that time I heard little of 
Henry Maitland, though I have some dim re- 
membrance of a letter I received from him tell- 
ing me that he was in America. It was in 1879 
that I shipped before the mast at Melbourne in 
a blackwall barque and came back to England 
as a seaman. 



CHAPTER II 

A PSYCHOLOGIST or a romancer might 
comment on the matter of the last chap- 
ter till the sun went down, but the 
world perhaps would not be much further ad- 
vanced. It is better, I think, for the man's 
apology or condemnation to come out of the 
drama that followed. This is where Life mocks 
at Art. The tragic climax and catastrophe are 
in the first act, and the remainder is a long and 
bitter commentary. Maitland and I never dis- 
cussed his early life. Practically we never 
spoke of Moorhampton though we often enough 
touched on ancient things by implication. His 
whole life as I saw it, and as I shall relate it, is 
but a development of the nature which made his 
disaster possible. 

So one comes back to my own return from 
Australia. I had gone out there as a boy, and 
came back a man, for I had had a man's experi- 
ences; work, adventure, travel, hunger, and 
thirst. All this hardened a somewhat neurotic 
temperament, at any rate for the time, till life 
in a city, and the humaner world of books re- 

33 



34 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

moved the temper which one gets when plunged 
in the baths of the ocean. During some months 
I worked for a position in the Civil Service and 
thought very little of Maitland, for he was lost. 
Yet as I got back into the classics he returned to 
me at times, and I wrote to my own friends in 
Moorhampton about him. They sent me vague 
reports of him in the United States, and then at 
last there came word that he was once more in 
England; possibly, and even probably, in Lon- 
don. Soon afterwards I found an advertise- 
ment in the AtherKBum of a book entitled '^Chil- 
dren of the Dawn," by Henry Maitland. As 
soon as I saw it I went straightway to the firm 
which published it, and being ignorant of the 
ways of publishers, demanded Maitland's ad- 
dress, which was promptly and very properly 
refused— for all they knew I might have been a 
creditor. They promised, however, to send on 
a letter to him, and I wrote one at once, receiv- 
ing an answer the very next day. He appointed 
as our meeting-place the smoking-room of the 
Horse Shoe Hotel at the bottom of Tottenham 
Court Road. Conceivably it was one of the 
most curious meetings that had ever taken place 
in such a locality. We met late at night in the 
crowded smoking-room, and I found him very 
much his old self, for he was still a handsome 
and intelligent boy, though somewhat worn and 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 35 

haggard considering his years. As for myself, 
I remember that he told me, chuckling, that I 
looked like a soldier, which was no doubt the 
result of some years on horseback — possibly I 
walked with a cavalry stride. We sat and 
drank coffee, and had whiskey, and smoked, un- 
til we were turned out of the hotel at half-past 
twelve. It was perhaps owing to the fact that I 
was ever the greater talker that he learnt more 
of my life in Australia than I learnt of his in the 
United States. He was, in fact, somewhat re- 
served as to his adventures there. And yet, lit- 
tle by little, I learnt a great deal — it was always 
a case of little by little with him. At no time 
did he possess any great fluency or power of 
words when speaking of his own life. 

It seems that friends had given him some let- 
ters to writers and others in New York, and he 
made the acquaintance there of many whose 
names I forget. I only recollect the name of 
Lloyd Garrison, the poet. Maitland told me 
that upon one occasion Lloyd Garrison induced 
him to go home with him about two o'clock in 
the morning to hear a sonnet on which Garrison 
had been working, as he affirmed almost with 
tears, for three whole months. As Maitland 
said, the result hardly justified the toil. Among 
the friends that he made there were a few artis- 
tic and literary tendencies who had made a little 



36 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

club, where it was de rigueur at certain times to 
produce something in the form of a poem. 
Maitland showed me the set of verses with 
which he had paid his literary footing; they 
were amusing, but of no great importance. So 
long as Maitland's money lasted in New York 
he had not an unpleasant time. It was only 
when he exhausted his means and had to earn a 
living by using his wits that he found himself 
in great difficulties, which were certainly not to 
be mitigated by the production of verse. But 
Maitland never pretended to write poetry, 
though he sometimes tried. I still have a few 
of his poems in my possession, one of them a set 
of love verses which he put into one of his books 
but omitted on my most fervent recommenda- 
tion. I believe, however, that there is still much 
verse by him in existence, if he did not destroy 
it in later years when circumstances, his wan- 
derings and his poverty, made it inconvenient 
to preserve comparatively worthless papers. 
And yet, if he did not destroy it, it might now 
be of no small interest to men of letters. 

When his means were almost exhausted he 
went to Boston, and from there drifted to Chi- 
cago. With a very few comments and altera- 
tions, the account given in "Paternoster Row," 
contains the essence of Maitland's own adven- 
tures in America. It is, of course, written in a 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 37 

very light style, and is more or less tinged with 
humour. This humour, however, is purely lit- 
erary, for he felt very little of it when he was 
telling me the story. He certainly lived during 
two days, for instance, upon peanuts, and he did 
it in a town called Troy. I never gathered 
what actually drove him to Chicago : it was, per- 
haps, the general idea that one gets in America 
that if one goes west one goes to the land of 
chances, l)ut it certainly was not the land for 
Henry Maitland. Nevertheless, as he relates 
in ^'Paternoster Row," he reached it with less 
than five dollars in his pocket, and with a cour- 
age which he himself marvelled at, paid four 
and a half dollars for a week's board and lodg- 
ing, which made him secure for the moment. 
This boarding-house he once or twice described 
to me. It was an unclean place somewheje on 
Wabash Avenue, and was occupied very largely 
by small actors and hangers-on at the Chicago 
theatres. The food was poor, the service was 
worse, and there was only one common room, in 
which they ate and lived. It was at this time, 
when he had taken a look round Chicago and 
found it very like Hell or Glasgow, which, in- 
deed, it is, that he determined to attack the edi- 
tor of the Chicago Tribune. The description 
he gives of this scene in "Paternoster Row" is 
not wholly accurate. I remember he said that 



38 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

he walked to and fro for hours outside the offices 
of the paper before he took what remained of 
his courage in both hands, rushed into the ele- 
vator, and was carried to an upper story. He 
asked for work, and the accessible and genial 
editor demanded, in return, what experience he 
had had with journalism. He said, with des- 
perate boldness, ''None whatever," and the edi- 
tor, not at all unkindly, asked him what he 
thought he could do for them. He replied, 
"There is one thing that is wanting in your 
paper." ''What is that?" asked the editor. 
"Fiction," said Maitland, "I should like to 
write you some." The editor considered the 
matter, and said that he had no objection to using 
a story provided it was good; it would serve for 
one of the weekly supplements, because these 
American papers at the end of the week have 
amazing supplements, full of all sorts of con- 
ceivable matter. Maitland asked if he might 
try him with a story of English life, and got per- 
mission to do so. 

He went away and walked up and down the 
lake shore for hours in the bitter wind, trying to 
think out a story, and at last discovered one. On 
his way home he bought a pen, ink, and paper, 
which they did not supply at the boarding-house. 
As it was impossible to write in his bedroom, 
where there was, of course, no fire, and no proper 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 39 

heating, it being so poor a place, he was com- 
pelled to write on the table of the common room 
with a dozen other men there, talking, smoking, 
and no doubt quarrelling. He wrote this story 
in a couple of days, and it was long enough to 
fill several columns of the paper. To his in- 
tense relief it was accepted by the editor after 
a day or t\^o's waiting, and he got eighteen dol- 
lars according to ^Taternoster Row," though I 
believe as a matter of fact it was less in reality. 
He stayed for some time in Chicago working 
for the Tribune, but at last found that he could 
write no more. I believe the editor himself sug- 
gested that the stories were perhaps not quite 
what he wanted. The one that I saw I only re- 
member vaguely. It was, however, a sort of 
psychological love-story placed in London, writ- 
ten without much distinction. 

The account Broughton gives in ^Taternoster 
Row" of his visit to Troy is fairly representative 
of Maitland's experiences. It was there that he 
lived for two or three days on peanuts, buying 
five cents' worth in the street now and then at 
some Italian peanut stand. In ^'Paternoster 
Row" he calls them loathsome, and no doubt 
they soon do become loathsome. A few are 
rather pleasing, more than a few are objection- 
able; and when anybody tries a whole diet of 
them for a day or two there is no doubt ''loath- 



M THE PRIVATE LIFE 

some" would be the proper word. After that 
he worked for a photographer for a few days, 
and then, I think, for a plumber, but of this I 
remember very little. It is quite certain that 
he never earned enough money in America to 
enable him to return to England, but who lent 
it to him I have no idea. To have been twenty- 
four hours with no more than a handful of pea- 
nuts in his pocket was no doubt an unpleasant 
experience, but, as I told him, it seemed very 
little to me. On one occasion in Australia I 
had been rather more than four and a half days 
without food when caught in a flood. Never- 
theless this starvation was for him one of the 
initiation ceremonies into the mysteries of liter- 
ature, and he was always accustomed to say, 
''How can such an one write? He never 
starved." 

Nevertheless to have been hard up in Chicago 
was a very great experience, as every one knows 
who knows that desperate city of the plains. 
Since that time I myself have known Chicago 
well, and have been there "dead broke." Thus 
I can imagine the state that he must have been 
in, and how desperate he must have become, to 
get out of his difficulties in the way that he actu- 
ally employed. The endeavour to obtain work 
in a hustling country like the United States is 
ever a desperate proceeding for a nervous and 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 41 

sensitive man, and what it must have been to 
Henry Maitland to do v^hat he did v^ith the 
editor of the Chicago Tribune can only be im- 
agined by those who knew him. In many ways 
he was the most modest and the shyest man who 
ever lived, and yet he actually told this editor: 
"I have come to point out to you there is a se- 
rious lack in your paper." To those who knew 
Maitland this must seem as surprising as it did 
to myself, and in later years he sometimes 
thought of that incident with inexpressible joy in 
his own courage. Of course the oddest thing 
about the whole affair is that up to that moment 
he had never written fiction at all, and only 
did it because he was driven to desperation. As 
will be seen when I come later to discuss his 
qualifications as a writer this is a curious com- 
ment on much of his bigger work. To me it 
seems that he should never have written fiction 
at all, although he did it so admirably. I think 
it would be very interesting if some American 
student of Maitland would turn over the files 
of the Tribune in the years 1878 and 1879 and 
disinter the work he did there. This is prac- 
tically all I ever learnt about his life on the 
other side of the Atlantic. I was, indeed, more 
anxious to discover how he lived in London, 
and in what circumstances. I asked him as deli- 
cately as possible about his domestic circum- 



42 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

stances, and he then told me that he was mar- 
ried, and that his wife was with him in London. 
It is very curious to think that I never actually 
met his first wife. I had, of course, seen her 
photograph, and I have on several occasions 
been in the next room to her. On those occasions 
she was usually unable to be seen, mostly because 
she was intoxicated. When we renewed our ac- 
quaintance in the Horse Shoe Tavern he was 
then living in mean apartments in one of the 
back streets off Tottenham Court Road not very 
far from the hotel and indeed not far from a 
cellar that he once occupied in a neighbouring 
street. Little by little as I met him again and 
again I began to get some hold upon his actual 
life. Gradually he became more confidential, 
and I gathered from him that the habits of his 
wife were perpetually compelling him to move 
from one house to another. From what he told 
me, sometimes hopefully, and more often in des- 
peration, it seems that this poor creature made 
vain and violent efforts to reform, gener- 
ally after some long debauch. And of this I 
am very sure, that no man on earth could have 
made more desperate efforts to help her than he 
made. But the actual fact remains that they 
were turned out of one lodging after the other, 
for even the poorest places, it seems, could 
hardly stand a woman of her character in the 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 43 

house. I fear it was not only that she drank, 
but at intervals she deserted him and went back, 
for the sake of more drink, and for the sake of 
money with which he was unable to supply her, 
to her old melancholy trade. And yet she re- 
turned again with tears, and he took her in, do- 
ing his best for her. It was six months after our 
first meeting in Tottenham Court Road that he 
asked me to go and spend an evening with him. 
Naturally enough I then expected to make 
Mrs. Maitland's acquaintance, but on my ar- 
rival he showed some disturbance of mind and 
told me that she was ill and would be unable 
to see me. The house they lived in then was 
not very far from Mornington Crescent. It 
was certainly in some dull neighbourhood not 
half a mile away. The street was, I think, a 
cul-de-sac. It was full of children of the lower 
orders playing in the roadway. Their fathers 
and mothers, it being Saturday night, sat upon 
the doorsteps, or quarrelled, or talked in the 
road. The front room in which he received 
me was both mean and dirty. The servant who 
took me upstairs was a poor foul slut, and I do 
not think the room had been properly cleaned 
or dusted for a very long time. The whole of 
the furniture in it was certainly not worth seven 
and sixpence from the point of view of the or- 
dinary furniture dealer. There were signs in 



44 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

it that it had been occupied by a woman, and 
one without the common elements of decency 
and cleanliness. Under a miserable and broken 
sofa lay a pair of dirty feminine boots. And 
yet on one set of poor shelves there were, still 
shining with gold, the prizes Maitland had won 
at Moorhampton College, and his painfully ac- 
quired stock of books that he loved so much. 

As I came in by arrangement after my own 
dinner, we simply sat and smoked and drank a 
little whiskey. Twice in the course of an hour 
our conversation was interrupted by the servant 
knocking at the door and beckoning to Mait- 
land to come out. In the next room I then 
heard voices, sometimes raised, sometimes plead- 
ing. When Maitland returned the first time he 
said to me, ^'I am very sorry to have to leave 
you for a few minutes. My wife is really un- 
well." But I knew by now the disease from 
which she suffered. Twice or thrice I was 
within an ace of getting up and saying, ''Don't 
you think I'd better go, old chap?" And then 
he was called out again. He came back at last 
in a state of obvious misery and perturbation, 
and said, "My dear man, my wife is so ill that 
I think I must ask you to go." I shook hands 
with him in silence and went, for I understood. 
A little afterwards he told me that that very 
afternoon his wife had gone out, and obtaining 



OF HENRY MAITLAISTD 45 

drink in some way had brought it home with 
her, and that she was then almost insane with 
alcohol. This was the kind of life that Henry 
Maitland, perhaps a great man of letters, lived 
for years. Comfortable people talk of his pes- 
simism, and his greyness of outlook, and never 
understand. The man really was a hedonist, he 
loved things beautiful — beautiful and orderly.^ 
He rejoiced in every form of Art, in books and 
music, and in all the finer inheritance of the past. 
But this was the life he lived, and the life he 
seemed to be doomed to live from the very first. 
When a weak man has a powerful sense of duty 
he is hard to handle by those who have some 
wisdom. In the early days I had done my best 
to induce him to give up this woman, long be- 
fore he married her, when he was but a foolish 
bey. Now I once more did my best to get him 
to leave her, but I cannot pretend for an instant 
that anything I said or did would have had any 
grave effect if it had not been that the poor 
woman was herself doomed to be her own de- 
stroyer. Her outbreaks became more frequent, 
her departures from his miserable roof more 
prolonged. The windy gaslight of the slums 
appealed to her, and the money that she earned 
therein; and finally when it seemed that she 
would return no more he changed his rooms, 
and through the landlady of the wretched house 



46 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

at which he found she was staying he arranged 
to pay her ten shillings a week. As I know, he 
often made much less than ten shillings a week, 
and frequently found himself starving that she 
might have so much more to spend in drink. 

This went on for years. It was still going on 
in 1884 when I left England again and went out 
to Texas. I had not succeeded in making a suc- 
cessful attack upon the English Civil Service, 
and the hateful work I did afterwards caused 
my health to break down. I was in America for 
three years. During that time I wrote fully 
and with a certain regularity to Maitland. 
When I came back and was writing "The West- 
ern Trail," he returned me the letters he had re- 
ceived from me. Among them I found some, 
frequently dealing with literary subjects, ad- 
dressed from Texas, Minnesota, Iowa, the Rocky 
Mountains, Lower British Columbia, Oregon, 
and California. In his letters to me he never 
referred to Marian, but I gathered that his life 
was very hard, and, of course, I understood, 
without his saying it, that he was still supporting 
her. I found that this was so when I returned 
to England in 1887. ^^ that time, by dint of 
hard, laborious work, which included a great 
deal of teaching, he was making for the first \ 
time something of a living. He occupied a re- 
spectable but very dismal flat somewhere at the 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 47 

back of Madame Tussaud's, in a place at that 
time called ^^Cumberland Residences." It was 
afterwards renamed "Cumberland Mansions," 
and I well remember Maitland's frightful and 
really superfluous scorn of the snobbery which 
spoke in such a change of name. As I said, we 
corresponded the whole of the time I was in 
America. I used to send him a great deal of 
verse, some of which he pronounced actually 
poetry. No doubt this pleased me amazingly, 
and I wish that I still possessed his criticisms 
written to me while I was abroad. It is, from 
any point of view, a very great disaster that in 
some way which I cannot account for I have 
lost all his letters written to me previous to 1894. 
Our prolonged, and practically uninterrupted 
correspondence began in 1884, so I have actually 
lost the letters of ten whole years. They were 
interesting from many points of view. Much 
to my surprise, while I was in America, they 
came to me, not dated in the ordinary way, but 
according to the Comtist calendar. I wrote to 
him for an explanation, because up to that time 
I had never heard of it. In his answering letter 
he told me that he had become a Positivist. 
This was doubtless owing to the fact that he 
had come accidentally under the influence of 
some well-known Positivists. 

It seems that in desperation at his utter failure 



48 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

to make a real living at literature he had taken 
again to a tutor's work, which in a way was 
where he began. I find that in the marriage 
certificate between him and Marian Hilton he 
called himself a teacher of languages. But un- 
doubtedly he loathed teaching save in those rare 
instances where he had an intelligent and en- 
thusiastic pupil. At the time that I came back 
to England he was teaching Harold Edge- 
worth's sons. Without a doubt Harold Edge- 
worth was extremely kind to Henry Maitland 
and perhaps to some little extent appreciated 
him, in spite of the preface which he wrote in 
later years to the posthumous ''Basil." He was 
not only tutor to Harold Edgeworth's sons, but 
was also received at his house as a guest. He met 
there many men of a certain literary eminence; 
Cotter Morrison, for instance, of whom he some- 
times spoke to me, especially of his once char- 
acterising a social chatterer as a cloaca maxima 
of small talk. He also met Edmund Roden, 
with whom he remained on terms of friendship 
to the last, often visiting him in his house at 
Felixstowe, which is known to many men of 
letters. I think the fact that Edmund Roden 
was not only a man of letters but also, oddly 
enough, the manager of a great business, ap- 
pealed in some way to Maitland's sense of hu- 
mour. He liked Roden amazingly, and it was 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 49 

through him, if I remember rightly, that he be- 
came socially acquainted with George Mere- 
dith, whom, however, he had met in a business 
way when Meredith was reading for some firm 
of publishers at a salary of two hundred a year. 
Nevertheless, in spite of his making money by 
some tutorial work, Maitland was still as poor 
as a rat in a cellar, and the absurd antinomy be- 
tween the society he frequented at times and his 
real position, made him sometimes shout with 
laughter which was not always really humorous. 
It was during this period of his life that a lady 
asked him at an ^'at-home" what his experience 
was in the management of butlers. According 
to what he told me he replied seriously that he 
always strictly refrained from having anything 
to do with men servants, as he much preferred 
a smart-looking young maid. It was during 
this period that he did some work with a man 
employed, I think, at the London Skin Hos- 
pital. This poor fellow, it seemed, desired to 
rise in life, and possessed ambition. He wanted 
to pass the London matriculation examination 
and thus become, as he imagined, somebody of 
importance. Naturally enough, being but a 
clerk, he lacked time for work, and the arrange- 
ment come to between him and Maitland was 
that his teacher should go to his lodging at seven 
o'clock in the morning and give him his lesson 



50 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

in bed before breakfast. As this was just be- 
fore the time that Maitland worked for Mr. 
Harold Edgeworth, he was too poor, so he said, 
to pay bus fares from the slum in which he 
lived, and as a result he had to rise at six o'clock 
in the morning, walk for a whole hour to his 
pupil's lodging, and then was very frequently 
met with the message that Mr. So-and-so felt 
much too tired that morning to receive him, and 
begged Mr. Maitland would excuse him. It is 
a curious comment on the authority of "The 
Meditations of Mark Sumner," which many 
cling to as undoubtedly authentic, that he men- 
tions this incident as if he did not mind it. As 
a matter of fact he was furiously wrath with this 
man for not rising to receive him, and used to go 
away in a state of almost ungovernable rage, as 
he told me many and many a time. 

After my return from America we used to 
meet regularly once a week on Sunday after- 
noons, for I had now commenced my own initia- 
tion into the mystery of letters, and had become 
an author. By Maitland's advice, and, if I may 
say so, almost by his inspiration — most certainly 
his encouragement — I wrote "The Western 
Trail," and having actually printed a book I 
felt that there was still another bond between 
me and Maitland. I used to turn up regularly at 
7 K Cumberland Residences at three o'clock on 



i 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 51 

Sundays. From then till seven we talked of 
our work, of Latin and of Greek, of French, 
and of everything on earth that touched on liter- 
ature. Long before seven Maitland used to ap- 
ply himself very seriously to the subject of cook- 
ing. As he could not afford two fires he usually 
cooked his pot on the fire of the sitting-room. 
This pot of his was a great institution. It re- 
minds me something of the gypsies' pot in which 
they put everything that comes to hand. Mait- 
land's idea of cooking was fatness and a certain 
amount of gross abundance. He used to put 
into this pot potatoes, carrots, turnips, portions 
of meat, perhaps a steak, or on great days a 
whole rabbit, all of which he had bought him- 
self, and carried home with his own hands. We 
used to watch the pot boiling, and perhaps about 
seven or half-past he would investigate its con- 
tents with a long, two-pronged iron fork, and 
finally decide much to our joy and contentment 
that the contents were edible. After our meal, 
for which I was usually ready, as I was prac- 
tically starving much of this time myself, we 
removed the debris, washed up in company, and 
resumed our literary conversation, which some- 
times lasted until ten or eleven. By that time 
Maitland usually turned me out, although my 
own day was not necessarily done for several 
hours. At those times when I was writing at 



52 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

all, I used to write between midnight and six 
o'clock in the morning. 

Those were great talks that we had, but they 
were nearly always talks about ancient times, 
about the Greeks and Romans, so far as we 
strayed from English literature. It may seem 
an odd thing, and it is odd until it is explained, 
that he had very little interest in the Renais- 
sance. There is still in existence a letter of his 
to Edmund Roden saying how much he re- 
gretted that he took no interest in it. That letter 
was, I think, dated from Siena, a city of the 
Renaissance. The truth of the matter is that he 
was essentially a creature of the Renaissance 
himself, a pure Humanist. For this very rea- 
son he displayed no particular pleasure in that 
period. He was interested in the time in which 
the men of the Renaissance revelled after its 
rediscovery and the new birth of learning. He 
would have been at his best if he had been born 
when that time was in flower. The fathers of 
the Renaissance rediscovered Rome and Athens, 
and so did he. No one can persuade me that 
if this had been his fate his name would not now 
have been as sacred to all who love literature 
as those of Petrarch and his glorious fellows. 
As a matter of fact it was this very quality of 
his which gave him such a lofty and lordly con- 
tempt for the obscurantist theologian. In my 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 53 

mind I can see him treating with that irony 
which was ever his favourite weapon, some relic 
of the dark ages of the schools. In those hours 
that we spent together it was wonderful to hear 
him talk of Greece even before he knew it, for 
he saw it as it had been, or as his mind made 
him think it had been, not with the modern 
Greek — who is perhaps not a Greek at all — 
shouting in the market-place. I think that he 
had a historical imagination of a very high or- 
der, even though he undoubtedly failed when 
endeavouring to use it. That was because he 
used it in the wrong medium. But when he saw 
the Acropolis in his mind he saw it before the 
Turks had stabled their horses in the Parthenon, 
and before the English, worse vandals than the 
Turks, had brought away to the biting smoke of 
London the marbles of Pheidias. Even as a 
boy he loved the roar and fume of Rome, al- 
though he had not yet seen it and could only im- 
agine it. He saw in Italy the land of Dante and 
Boccaccio, a land still peopled in the south to- 
wards Sicily with such folks as these and Horace i 
had known. My own education had been 
wrought out in strange, rough places in the new 
lands. It was a fresh education for me to come 
back to London and sit with Maitland on these 
marvellous Sunday afternoons and evenings 
when he wondered if the time would ever come 



54 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

for him to see Italy and Greece in all reality. 
It was for the little touches of realism, the little 
pictures in the Odes, that he loved Horace, and 
loved still more his Virgil ; and, even more, The- 
ocritus and Moshos, for Theocritus wrote things 
which were ancient and yet modern, full of 
the truth of humanity. Like all the men of the 
Renaissance he turned his eyes wistfully to the 
immemorial past, renewed in the magic alembic 
of his own mind. 

Nevertheless, great as these hours were that 
we spent together, they were sometimes deeply 
melancholy, and he had nothing to console him 
for the miseries which were ever in the back- 
ground. It was upon one of these Sundays, I 
think early in January, 1888, that I found him in 
a peculiarly melancholy and desperate condi- 
tion. No doubt he was overworked, for he al- 
ways was overworked; but he said that he could 
stand it no longer, he must get out of London 
for a few days or so. For some reason which I 
cannot for the world understand, he decided to 
go to Eastbourne, and begged me to go with 
him. Why he should have selected, in Christ- 
mas weather and an east wind, what is possibly 
the coldest town in England in such conditions, 
I cannot say, but I remember that the journey 
down to the sea was mercilessly cold. Of 
course we went third class, and the carriages 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 55 

were totally unheated. We were both of us 
practically in extreme poverty. I was living in 
a single room in Chelsea, for which I paid four 
shillings a week, and for many months my total 
weekly expenses were something under twelve 
shillings. At that particular moment he was 
doing extremely badly, and the ten shillings that 
he paid regularly to his wife frequently left him 
with insufficient to live upon. I can hardly 
understand how it was that he determined to 
spend even the little extra money needed for 
such a journey. When we reached Eastbourne 
we walked with our bags in our hands down 
to the sea front, and then, going into a poor back 
street, selected rooms. It was perhaps what he 
and I often called ''the native malignity of mat- 
ter," and his extreme ill luck in the matter of 
landladies, which pursued him for ever through- 
out his life in lodgings, that the particular land- 
lady of the house in which we took refuge was 
extraordinarily incapable. The dwelling itself 
was miserably draughty and cold, and wretch- 
edly furnished. The east wind which blows 
over the flat marshes between Eastbourne and 
the Downs entered the house at every crack, and 
there were many of them. The first night we 
were in the town it snowed very heavily, and in 
our shabby little sitting-room we shivered in 
spite of the starved fire. We sat there with our 



56 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

overcoats on and did our best to be cheerful. 
Heaven alone knows what we talked of, but most 
likely, and very possibly, it may have been 
Greek metres, always his great passion. Yet 
neither of us was in good case. We both had 
trouble enough on our shoulders. I remember 
that he spoke very little of his wife, for I would 
not let him do so, although I knew she was most 
tremendously on his mind, and was, in fact, what 
had driven him for the moment out of London. 
Of course, he had a very natural desire that 
she should die and have done with life, with 
that life which must have been a torment to her- 
self as it was a perpetual torture and a running 
sore to him. At the same time the poor fellow 
felt that he had no right to wish that she would 
die, but I could see the wish in his eyes, and 
heaven knows that I wished it fervently for him. 
The next morning we went for a long walk 
across the Downs to the little village of East 
Dean. It was blowing a whole gale from the 
north east, and it was quite impossible to go near 
the steep cliffs. The snow was in places two 
feet deep, and a sunk road across the Downs 
was level with the turf. I think now that none 
but madmen would have gone out on such a day. 
Doubtless we were mad enough ; at any rate we 
were writers, and by all traditions had the right to 
be mad. But when we once got started we meant 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 57 

going through it at all events. I did not re- 
member many colder days, in spite of my trav- 
els, but we persevered, and at last came to the 
little village and there took refuge in the public- 
house and drank beer. Maitland, with his ex- 
traordinary mixture of fine taste and something 
which was almost grossness in regard to food, 
loved all malt liquors — I think partly because 
he felt some strange charm in their being his- 
torically English drinks. The walk back to 
Eastbourne tried us both hard, for neither of 
us had been well fed for months, and the wind 
and snow in our faces made walking heavy and 
difficult. Nevertheless Maitland was now al- 
most boisterously cheerful, as he often was out- 
wardly when he had most reason to be the op- 
posite. While he walked back the chief topic 
of conversation was the very excellent nature of 
the pudding which he had instructed our land- 
lady to prepare against a hungry return. 

He was always extraordinarily fond of rich, 
succulent dishes. A fritto misto for instance, 
made him shout for joy, though he never met 
with it until he went to Italy. With what in- 
imitable fervour of the gastronomic mind wouldi 
he declare these preferences! Dr. Johnson said I 
that in a haggis there was much ^'fine, confused 
feeding," and Maitland undoubtedly agreed 
with him, as he always said when he quoted the 



58 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

passage. In many of his books there are ex- 
amples of his curious feeling with regard to 
food. They are especially frequent in "Pater- 
noster Row" ; as, for instance, when one charac- 
ter says: ''Better dripping this than I've had 
for a long time. . . . Now, with a little pepper 
and salt, this bread and dripping is as appetising 
a food as I know. I often make a dinner of 
it." To which the other replies: "I have done 
the same myself before now. Do you ever buy 
pease-pudding?" and to this the Irishman's re- 
ply was enthusiastic. "I should think so! I 
get magnificent penn)rworths at a shop in Cleve- 
land Street, of a very rich quality indeed. Ex- 
cellent faggots they have there, too. I'll give 
you a supper of them one night before you go." 
I had often heard of this particular shop in 
Cleveland Street, and of one shop where they 
sold beef, kept by a man whose pride was that 
he had been carving beef behind the counter for 
thirty years without a holiday. 

And now we were hurrying back to East- 
bourne, Maitland said, not because it was cold; 
not because the north-east wind blew; not be- 
cause we were exposed to the very bitterest 
weather we remembered ; but because of an ex- 
ceedingly rich compound known as an apple 
pudding. He and the wind worked me up to 
an almost equal expression of ardour, and thus 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 59 

we came back to our poverty-stricken den in 
good spirits. But, alas, the dinner that day was 
actually disastrous. The meat was grossly over- 
done, the vegetables were badly cooked, the beer 
was thin and flat. We were in dismay, but still 
we said to each other hopefully that there was 
the pudding to come. It was brought on and 
looked very fine, and Maitland cut into it with 
great joy and gave me a generous helping. I 
know that I tasted it eagerly, but to my tongue 
there was an alien flavour about it. I looked 
up and said to Maitland, '^It is very curious, 
but this pudding seems to me to taste of kero- 
sene." Maitland laughed, but when his turn 
came to try he laughed no longer, for the pud- 
ding actually did taste of lamp oil. It ap- 
peared, on plaintive and bitter inquiry, that our 
unfortunate landlady after making it had put 
it under the shelf on which she kept her lamp 
gear. We subsided on melancholy and mouldy 
cheese. This disappointment, however childish 
it may appear to the better fed, was to Henry 
Maitland something really serious. Those who 
have read 'The Meditations of Mark Sumner," 
without falling into the error of thinking that 
the talk about food in that melancholy book 
was only his fun, will understand that it was a 
very serious matter with Maitland. It took all 
his philosophy and a very great deal of mine to 



60 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

survive the tragedy, and to go on talking as we 
did of new words and the riches of philology. 
And as we talked the wind roared down our 
street in a vicious frenzy. It was a monstrously 
bad time to have come to Eastbourne, and we 
had no compensations. 

It was the next night that the great news 
came. In spite of the dreariest weather we had 
spent most of the day in the open air. After 
our dinner, which this time was more of a suc- 
cess, or at any rate less of a tragic failure, we 
were sitting hugging the fire to keep warm when 
a telegram was brought in for him. He read it 
in silence and handed it over to me with the 
very strangest look upon his face that I had ever 
seen. It was unsigned, and came from London. 
The "message was: ^^Your wife is dead." 
There was nothing on earth more desirable for 
him than that she should die, the poor wretch 
truly being like a destructive wind, for she had 
torn his heart, scorched his very soul, and de- 
stroyed him in the beginning of his life. All 
irreparable disasters came from her, and through 
her. Had it not been for her he might then 
have held, or have begun to hope for, a great 
position at one of the universities. And now a 
voice out of the unknown cried that she was 
dead. 

He said to me, with a shaking voice and shak- 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 61 

ing hands, '^I cannot believe it — I cannot believe 
it." He was as v^hite as paper; for it meant so 
much — not only freedom from the disaster and 
shame and misery that drained his life-blood, 
but it would mean a cessation of money pay- 
ments at a time when every shilling was very 
hard to win. And yet this was when he was 
comparatively well known, for it was two years 
after the publication of 'The Mob." And still, 
though his books ran into many editions, for 
some inexplicable reason, which I yet hope to 
explain, he sold them one after another for fifty 
pounds. And I knew how he worked; how 
hard, how remorselessly. I knew who the chief 
character was in 'Taternoster Row" before 
"Paternoster Row" was written. I knew with 
what inexpressible anguish of soul he laboared, 
with what dumb rage against destiny. And 
now here was something like freedom at last, if 
only it were true. 

This message came so late at night that there 
was no possibility of telegraphing to London to 
verify it even if he had been sure that he could 
get to the original sender. It was also much too 
late to go up to town. We sat silently for hours, 
and I knew that he was going back over the 
burning marl of the past. Sometimes he did 
speak, asking once and again if it could be true, 
and I saw that while he was still uncertain he 



62 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

was bitter and pitiless. Yet if she were only 
really dead . . . 

We went up to town together in the morning. 
In the train he told me that while he was still 
uncertain, he could not possibly visit the place 
she lived in, and he begged me to go there 
straight and bring him word as to the truth of 
this report. I was to explore the desperate slum 
in the New Cut in which she had exhausted the 
last dreadful years of her life, and upon leaving 
him I went there at once. With Maitland's full 
permission I described something of the milieu 
in ^'J^hn Quest." On reaching the New Cut 
I dived into an inner slum from an outer one, 
and at last found myself in a kitchen which was 
only about eight or nine feet square. It was, 
of course, exceedingly dirty. The person in 
charge of it was a cheerful red-headed girl of 
about eighteen years of age. On learning the 
cause of my visit she went out and brought in 
her mother, and I soon verified the fact that 
Marian Maitland was dead. She had died the 
first bitter night we spent at Eastbourne, and was 
found next morning without any blankets, and 
with no covering for her emaciated body but a 
damp and draggled gown. 

Presently the neighbours came in to see the 
gentleman who was interested in this woman's 
death. They talked eagerly of the funeral, for, 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 63 

as Maitland knew only too well, a funeral, to 
these people, is one of their great irregular but 
recurring festivals. At Maitland's desire I gave 
them carte blanche up to a certain sum, and I 
think they felt that, as the agent of the husband, I 
behaved very well. Of course they knew all about 
the poor girl who lay dead upstairs, and although 
they were honest enough people in their way, 
and though the red-headed girl to whom I first 
talked worked hard in a factory making hooks 
and eyes, as she told me, they seemed to have 
no moral feelings whatever about her very ob- 
vious profession. I myself did not see the dead 
woman. I was not then acquainted with death, 
save among strangers. I could not bring m.y- 
self to look upon her. Although death is so 
dreadful always, the surroundings of death may 
make things worse. But still, she was dead, and 
I hastened back to Maitland to tell him so. It 
was a terrible and a painful relief to him; and 
when he was sure she was gone, he grieved for 
her, grieved for what she might have been, and 
for what she was. He remembered now that at 
intervals she used to send him heart-breaking 
messages asking to be forgiven, messages that 
even his unwisdom at last could not listen to. 
But he said very little. So far as the expres- 
sion of his emotions went he often had very 
great self-control. It is a pity that his self-con-^ 



64 HENRY MAITLAND 



(;■ 



trol so rarely extended itself to acts. But now 
e was free. Those who have forged their own 
chains, and lived in a hell of their own dread- 
ful making, can understand what this is and 
what it means. But he did go down to the pit 
in which she died, and when I saw him a day 
or two later he was strangely quiet, even for 
him. He said to me, ^'My dear chap, she had 
kept my photograph, and a very little engraving 
of the Madonna di San Sisto, all these years of 
horrible degradation." He spoke in the almost 
inaudible tone that was characteristic of him, 
especially at that time. We arranged the fun- 
eral together, and she was buried. If only all 
the misery that she had caused him could have 
been buried with her, it would have been well. 
She died of what I may call, euphemistically, 
specific laryngitis. Once he told me a dreadful 
story about her in hospital. One of the doc- 
tors at St. Thomas's had questioned her, and 
after her answers sent for Maitland, and speak- 
ing to him on the information given him by the 
wife, was very bitter. Henry, even as he told 
me this years after, shook with rage and indig- 
nation. He had not been able to defend himself 
without exposing his wife's career. 



CHAPTER III 

THERE are many methods of writing 
biography. Each has its advantages, 
even the chronological compilation. 
But chronology is no strong point of mine, and 
in this sketch I shall put but little stress on 
dates. There is great advantage in describing 
things as they impress themselves on the writer. 
A portrait gains in coherency and completeness 
by temporary omissions more than it can ever 
gain by the empty endeavour to handle each pe- 
riod fully. In this last chapter I might have 
endeavoured to describe Maitland at work, or to 
speak of his ambitions, or even to criticise what 
he had already done, or to give my own views of 
what he meant to achieve. There is authority 
for every method, and most authorities are bad, 
save Boswell — and few would pine for BoswelPs 
qualities at the price of his failings. Yet one 
gets help from him everywhere, little as it may 
show. Only the other day I came across a pas- 
sage in the ''Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides" 
which has some value. Reporting Johnson, he 
writes: ^Talking of biography, he said he did 

65 



66 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

not think the life of any literary man in England 
had been well written. Besides the common in- 
cidents of life it should tell us his studies, his 
mode of living, the means by which he attained 
to excellence, and his opinion of his own works." 
Such I shall endeavour to do. Nevertheless 
Johnson was wrong. Good work had then been 
done in biography by Walton, whose Lives, by 
the way, Maitland loved; and Johnson himself 
was not far from great excellence when he de- 
scribed his friend Savage in the ^'Lives of the 
Poets" in spite of its want of colloquial ease. 
There came in then the value of friendship and 
actual personal knowledge, as it did in Boswell's 
*'Life," I can only hope that my own deep ac- 
quaintance with Maitland will compensate for 
my want of skill in the art of writing lives, for 
which novel-writing is but a poor training. Yet 
the deeper one's knowledge the better it is to 
simplify as one goes, taking things by them- 
selves, going forwards or backwards as may 
seem best, without care of tradition, especially 
where tradition is mostly bad. We do not write 
biography in England now as Romain Rolland 
writes that of Beethoven. Seldom are we 
grieved for our heroes, or rejoice with them. 
Photography, or the photographic portrait, is 
more in request than an impression. However, 
to resume in my own way, having to be content 



or HENRY MAITLAND 67 

with that, and caring little for opinion, that fluc- 
tuant critic. 

Long as our friendship existed it is perhaps 
curious that we never called each other, except 
on very rare occasions, by anything but our sur- 
names. This, I think, is due to the fact that 
we had been at Moorhampton College together. 
It is, I imagine, the same thing with all school- 
boys. Provided there is no nickname given, 
men who have been chums at school seem to 
prefer the surname by which they knew their 
friends in the early days. I have often noticed 
there is a certain savage tendency on the part of 
boys to suppress their Christian names, their 
own peculiar mark. And sometimes I have 
wondered whether this is not in some obscure 
way a survival of the savage custom of many 
tribes in which nobody is ever mentioned by his 
right name, because in that name there inheres 
mysteriously the very essence of his being and 
inheritance, the knowledge of which by others 
may expose him to some occult danger. 

I believe I said above that from the time I 
first met Maitland after my return from Aus- 
tralia, until I went away again to Arizona, I was 
working in the Admiralty and the India Office 
as a writer at tenpence an hour. No doubt I 
thought the pay exiguous, and my prospects 
worth nothing. Yet when I came back from 



68 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

America and found him domiciled at 7 K Cum- 
berland Residences, my economic basis in life 
became even more exiguous, whatever hope 
might have said of my literary future. I was, 
in fact, a great deal poorer than Maitland. He 
lived in a flat and had at least two rooms and a 
kitchen. Yet it was a horrible place of extraor- 
dinary gloom, and its back windows overlooked 
the roaring steam engines of the Metropolitan 
Railway. In some ways no doubt my own apart- 
ment, when I took to living by myself in Chel- 
sea, was superior in cheerfulness to 7 K. Shortly 
after my return to England, when I had ex- 
pended the fifty pounds I received for my first 
book, ''The Western Trail," I took a single room 
in Chelsea, put in a few sticks of furniture given 
to me by my people, and commenced housekeep- 
ing on my own account on all I could make and 
the temporary ten shillings a week allowed me 
by my father, who at that time, for all his na- 
tive respect for literature, regarded the practice 
of it with small hope and much suspicion. I 
know that it greatly amused Maitland to hear 
of his views on the subject of the self revelations 
in 'The Western Trail," which dealt with my 
life in Western America. After reading that 
book he did not speak to me for three days, and 
told my younger brother, "These are pretty rev- 
elations about your brother having been a com- 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 69 

mon loafer." At this Maitland roared, but he 
roared none the less when he understood that 
three columns of laudation in one of the reviews 
entirely changed my father's view of that particu- 
lar book. 

I should not trouble to say anything about my 
own particular surroundings if it were not that 
in a sense they also became Maitland's, although 
I went more frequently to him than he came to 
me. Nevertheless he was quite familiar with 
my one room and often had meals there which 
I cooked for him. Of course at that time, from 
one point of view, I was but a literary beginner 
and aspirant, while Maitland was a rising and 
respected man, who certainly might be poor, 
and was poor, but still he had published ''The 
Mob" and other books, his name was well 
known, and his prospects, from the literary, if 
not from the financial point of view, seemed very 
good. I was the author of one book, the result 
of three years' bitter hard experience, written 
in twenty-six days as a tour de force, and though 
I had ambition I seemed to have nothing more 
to write about. From my own point of view 
Maitland was, of course, very successful. His 
flat with more rooms than one in it was a man- 
sion, and he was certainly making something 
like a hundred a year. Still, I think that when 
he came down to me and found me compara- 



70 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

tively independent, he rather envied me. At 
any rate I had not to keep an errant wife on the 
money that I made with infinite difficulty. He 
came to see me in Chelsea in my very early days, 
and took great joy in my conditions. For one 
thing I had no attendance with this room. I 
was supposed to look after it for myself in every 
way. This, he assured me, made my estate the 
more gracious, as any one can understand who 
remembers all that he has said about landladies 
and lodging-house servants and charwomen. 
He was overjoyed with the list of things I 
bought: a fender and fire-irons, a coal-scuttle, a 
dust-bin, and blacking brushes. He found me 
one day shaving by the aid of my own dim re- 
flection in the glass of an etching which I had 
brought from home, because I had no looking- 
glass and no money to spare to buy one. I re- 
member we frequently went together over the 
question of finance. Incidentally I found his 
own habit of buying cooked meat peculiarly ex- 
travagant. I have a book somewhere among my 
papers in which I kept accounts for my first 
three months in Chelsea to see how I was going 
to live on ten shillings a week, which Maitland 
assured me was preposterous riches, even if I 
managed to make no more. 

Naturally enough, seeing that we had been 
friends for so long, and seeing that he had en- 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 71 

couraged me so greatly to write my first book, 
he took a vast interest in all my proceedings, and 
was very joyous, as he would have said, to ob- 
serve that I could not afford sheets but slept in 
the blankets which I had carried all over Amer- 
ica. I seek no sympathy on this point, for after 
all it was not a matter of my being unable to 
afford linen; it is impossible for the average 
comfortable citizen to understand how disagree- 
able sheets become after some thousands of nights 
spent camping in mere wool, even of the cheap- 
est. It took me years to learn to resign myself 
to cold linen, or even more sympathetic cotton, 
when I became a respectable householder. 

In the neighbourhood where I lived there 
was, of course, a great artistic colony, and as I 
knew one or two artists already, I soon became 
acquainted with all the others. Many of them 
were no richer than myself, and as Bohemia and 
the belief that there was still a Bohemia formed 
one of Maitland's greatest joys, he was always 
delighted to hear of any of our remarkable shifts 
to live. It is an odd thing to reflect that A. D. 
Mack, Frank Wynne, Albert Croft, and three 
other artists whose names I now forget, and I 
once had a glorious supper of fried fish served in 
a newspaper on the floor of an empty studio. The 
only thing I missed on that particular occasion 
was Maitland's presence, but, of course, the 



72 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

trouble was that Maitland would seldom asso- 
ciate with anybody whom he did not know al- 
ready, and I could rarely get him to make the ac- 
quaintance of my own friends. Yet such experi- 
ences as we were sometimes reduced to more than 
proved to him that his dear Bohemia existed, 
though later in his life, as one sees in ''Mark 
Sumner," he often seemed to doubt whether it 
was still extant. On this point I used to console 
him, saying that where any two artists butted 
their foolish heads against the economic system, 
there was Bohemia; Bohemia, in fact, was living 
on a course of high ideals, whatever the world 
said of them. At this hour there are writers 
learning their business on a little oatmeal, as 
George Meredith did, or destroying their diges- 
tions, as I did mine and Henry Maitland's, on 
canned corn beef. Even yet, perhaps, some 
writers and artists are making their one big meal 
a day on fried fish. 

One Sunday when I missed going to Mait- 
land's, because he was then out of town visiting 
his family, I had a tale for him on his return. 
It appeared that I had been writing, and had 
got so disgusted with the result of it that I found 
I could not possibly stay in my room, and so de- 
termined to go round to my friend Mack. No 
sooner had I made up my mind on this subject 
than there was a knock at the door, and pres- 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 73 

ently in came Mack himself. I said promptly, 
"It is no good your coming here, for I was just 
going round to you." Whereupon he replied, 
'^It is no good your coming to me because I have 
no coal, no coke, and nobody will give me any 
more because I owe for so much already." I 
replied that I was not going to stay in my room 
in any case, and affirmed that I would rather 
be in his studio in the cold than the room where 
I was. Whereupon he suddenly discovered that 
my scuttle was actually full of coal, and proposed 
to take it round to the studio. This seemed 
a really brilliant idea, and after much discus- 
sion of ways and means my inventive faculty 
produced an old portmanteau and several news- 
papers, and after wrapping up lumps of coal 
in separate pieces of paper we packed the port- 
manteau with the coal and carried it round to 
the studio in Manresa Road. This seemed to 
Maitland so characteristic of an artist's life that 
he was very much delighted when I told him. 

It is an odd thing that in one matter Maitland 
and I were at that time much alike. From 
most points of view there can hardly have been 
two more different men, for he was essentially a 
man of the study and the cloister, while I was 
far more naturally a man of the open air. 
Nevertheless, when it came to journalism we 
were both of the same mind. While I was away 



74 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

from England and he was teaching Harold 
Edgeworth's sons, Edgeworth introduced him 
to John Harley, then editing the Piccadilly Ga- 
zette, who offered, and would no doubt have 
kept to it, to use as much matter as possible if 
Maitland would supply him with something in 
the journalistic form. Apparently he found it 
too much against his natural grain to do this 
work, and I was now in the same predicament. 
It is true that I had something of a natural 
journalistic flair which he lacked, but my nose 
for a likely article was rendered entirely useless 
to me by the fact that I never could write any- 
thing until I had thought about it for several 
days, by which time it was stale, and much too 
late from the newspaper point of view. Never- 
theless Maitland did occasionally do a little odd 
journalism, for I remember once, before I went 
to America, being with him when he received 
the proofs of an article from the St. James* Ga- 
zette, and picking up ^'Mark Sumner" one may 
read: ''I thought of this as I sat yesterday 
watching a noble sunset, which brought back to 
my memory the sunsets of a London autumn, 
thirty years ago. It happened that, on one such 
evening, I was by the river at Chelsea, with noth- 
ing to do except to feel that I was hungry, and 
to reflect that, before morning, I should be 
hungrier still. I loitered upon Battersea Bridge 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 75 

— the old picturesque wooden bridge, and there 
the western sky took hold upon me. Half an 
hour later I was speeding home. I sat down, 
and wrote a description of what I had seen, and 
straightway sent it to an evening paper, which, 
to my astonishment, published the thing next 
day — 'On Battersea Bridge.' " I have never 
seen that article since I saw the proof of it, but 
there was something so characteristic in it that 
I think it would be worth some one's while to 
hunt up the files of the St. James^ Gazette in 
order to find it. It appears that while he was 
leaning over the bridge, enjoying the sunset, 
there was also a workman looking at it. The 
river was at a low stage, for it was at least three- 
quarters-ebb, and on each side of the river there 
were great patches of shining mud, in which the 
glorious western sky was reflected, turning the 
ooze into a mass of most wonderful colour. 
Maitland said to me, "Of course I was pleased 
to see somebody else, especially a poor fellow 
like that, enjoying the beauty of the sunset. But 
presently my companion edged a little closer to 
me, and seeing my eyes directed towards the 
mud which showed such heavenly colouring, he 
remarked to me, with an air of the deepest in- 
terest. Throws up an 'eap of mud, don't she?' " 
Sometimes when Maitland came down to me 
in Danvers Street he used to go over my ac- 



76 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

counts and discuss means of making them less. 
I think his chief joy in them was the feeling 
that some of his more respectable friends, such 
as Harold Edgeworth, would have been horri- 
fied at my peculiarly squalid existence. In a 
sense it was, no doubt, squalid, and yet in another 
it was perhaps the greatest time in my life, and 
Maitland knew it. In the little book in which 
I kept my expenses he came across one day on 
which I had absolutely spent nothing. This 
was a great joy to him. On another day he 
found a penny put down as ^'charity." On look- 
ing up the book I find that a note still declares 
that this penny was given to a little girl to pay 
her fare in the bus. I remember quite well that 
this beneficence on my part necessitated my 
walking all the way to Chelsea from Hyde Park 
Corner. Yet Maitland assured me that, com- 
pared with himself at times, I was practically a 
millionaire, although he owned that he had very 
rarely beaten my record for some weeks when 
all expenditure on food was but three-and-six- 
pence. One week it actually totalled no more 
than one-and-elevenpence, but I have no doubt 
that I went out to eat with somebody else on 
those days — unless it was at the time my liver 
protested, and gave me such an attack of gloom 
that I went to bed and lay there for three days 
without eating, firmly determined to die and 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 77 

have done with the literary struggle. This fast 
did me a great deal of good. On the fourth day 
I got up and rustled vigorously for a meal, and 
did some financing with the admirable result of 
producing a whole half-crown. 

Whenever Maitland came to me I cooked his 
food and my own on a little grid, or in a frying- 
pan, over the fire in my one room. This fire 
cost me on an average a whole shilling a week, 
or perhaps a penny or two more if the coals, 
which I bought in the street, went up in price. 
This means that I ran a fire on a hundredweight 
of coal each week, or sixteen pounds of coal a 
day. Maitland, who was an expert on coal, as- 
sured me that I was extremely extravagant, and 
that a fire could be kept going for much less. 
On trying, I found out that when I was exceed- 
ingly hard up I could keep in a very little fire 
for several hours a day on only eight pounds 
of coal, but sometimes I had to let it go out, and 
run round to a studio to get warm by some 
artist's stove, — provided always that the mer- 
chant in coke who supplied him had not refused 
my especial friend any further credit. 

At this time Maitland and I were both accus- 
tomed to work late, although he was just then 
beginning to labour at more reasonable times, 
though not to write fewer hours. As for me, I 
used to find getting up in the morning at a 



78 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

proper hour quite impossible. Probably this 
was due to some inherited gout, to poisonous in- 
digestion from my own cooking, or to a contin- 
ued diet of desiccated soups and "Jungle" beef 
from Chicago. However, it seemed to Mait- 
land that I was quite in the proper tradition of 
letters while I was working on a long novel, 
only published years afterwards, which I used 
to begin at ten or eleven o'clock at night, fre- 
quently finishing at six o'clock in the morning 
when the sparrows began to chirp outside my 
window. 

As a result of this night-work I used to get up 
at four o'clock in the afternoon, sometimes even 
later, to make my own breakfast. Afterwards 
I would go out to see some of my friends in their 
studios, and at the time most people were think- 
ing of going to bed I sat down to the wonder- 
fully morbid piece of work which I believed 
was to bring me fame. This was a rather odd 
book, called 'The Fate of Hilary Dale." It 
has no claim whatever to any immortality, and 
from my point of view its only value lies in the 
fact that there is a very brief sketch of Maitland 
in it. He is described in these words: "Will 
Curgenven, writer, teacher, and general apostle 
of culture, as it is understood by the elect, had 
been hard at work for some hours on an essay 
on Greek metres, and was growing tired of it. 



OF HENRY MAITLAND T9 

His dingy subject and dingy Baker Street flat 
began to pall on him, and he rose to pace his nar- 
row room." Now Will Curgenven, of course, 
was Maitland and the dingy Baker Street flat 
was 7 K. '' ^Damn the nature of things,' as Por- 
son said when he swallowed embrocation instead 
of whisky!" was what I went on to put into his 
mouth. This, indeed, was one of Maitland's 
favourite exclamations. It stood with him for 
all the strange and blasphemous and eccentric 
oaths with which I then decorated my language, 
the result of my experiences in the back blocks 
of Australia and the Pacific Slope of America. 
In this book I went on to make a little fun of his 
great joy in Greek metres. I remember that 
once he turned to me with an assumed air of 
strange amazement and exclaimed: ^Why, my 
dear fellow, do you know there are actually 
miserable men who do not know — who have 
never even heard of — the minuter differences 
between Dochmiacs and Antispasts!" That, 
again, reminds me of a passage in "Paternoster 
Row," w^hich always gives me acute pleasure 
because it recalls Maitland so wonderfully. It 
is where one of the characters came in to the 
hero and wanted his opinion on the scansion of 
a particular chorus in the "CEdipus Rex." 
Maydon laid hold of the book, thought a bit, 
and began to read the chorus aloud. Where- 



80 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

upon the other one cried: ^'Choriambics, eh? 
Possible, of course; but treat them as Ionics a 
minore with an anacrusis, and see if they don't 
go better." Now in this passage the speaker is 
really Maitland, for he involved himself in 
terms of pedantry with such delight that his 
eyes gleamed. No doubt it was an absurd 
thing, but Greek metres afforded so bright a 
refuge from the world of literary struggle and 
pressing financial difficulty. 

^'Damn the nature of things!" was Porson's 
oath. Now Maitland had a very peculiar ad- 
miration for Porson. Porson was a Grecian. 
He loved Greek. That was sufficient for Mait- 
land. In addition to that claim on his love, it 
is obvious that Porson was a man of a certain 
Rabelaisian turn of mind, and that again was a 
sufficient passport to his favour. No doubt if 
Porson had invited Maitland to his rooms, and 
had then got wildly drunk, it would have an- 
noyed Maitland greatly; but the picture of Por- 
son shouting Greek and drinking heavily at- 
tracted him immensely. He often quoted all 
the little stories told of Porson, such as the very 
well-known one of another scholar calling on 
him by invitation late one evening, and finding 
the room in darkness and Porson on the floor. 
This was when his visitor called out: 'Torson, 
where are the candles, and where's the whis- 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 81 

key? " and Porson answered, still upon the floor, 
but neither forgetful of Greek nor of his native 
wit. 

When any man of our acquaintance was alluded 
to with hostility, or if one animadverted on some 
popular person who was obviously uneducated, 
Maitland always vowed that he did not know 
Greek, and probably or certainly had never 
starved. His not knowing Greek was, of course, 
a very great offence to Maitland, for he used to 
quote Porson on Hermann: 

''The Germans In Greek 
Are far to seek. 
Not one in five score, 
But ninety-nine more. 
All save only Hermann, 
And Hermann's a German." 

Of course a man who lacked Greek, and had not 
starved, was anathema — not to be considered. 
And whatever Porson may have done he did 
know Greek, and that saved his soul. Maitland 
often quoted very joyfully what he declared to 
be some of the most charming lines in the 
English language : 

"I went to Strasburg, and there got drunk 
With the most learned Professor Runck. 
I went to Wortz, and got more drunken 
With the more learned Professor Runcken." 



82 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

But if the spirit was willing, the flesh was weak. 
I never saw Maitland drunk in his life. Indeed 
he was no real expert in drinking. He had 
never had any education in the wines he loved. 
Any amateur of the product of the vine will 
know how to estimate his actual qualifications 
as a judge, when I say that Asti, Capri, and es- 
pecially Chianti seemed to him the greatest 
wines in the world, since by no means could he 
obtain the right Falernian of Horace, which, by 
the way, was probably a most atrocious vintage. 
As it happened I had been employed for many 
months on a great vineyard in California, and 
there had learnt not a little about the making 
and blending of wine. Added to this I had 
some natural taste in it, and had read a great 
deal about wine-making and the great vintages 
of France and Germany. One could always in- 
terest Maitland by telling him something about 
wine, provided one missed out the scientific side 
of it. But it was sad that I lacked, from his 
point of view, the proper enthusiasm for 
Chianti. Yet, indeed, one knows what was in 
his classic mind, from the fact that a poor vin- 
tage in a real Italian flask, or in something 
shaped like an amphora, would have made him 
chuckle with joy far more readily than if a rich 
man had offered him in a bottle some glorious 
first growth of the Medoc, Laffitte, Latour, or 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 83 

Haut-Brion. But, indeed, he and I, even when 
I refused indignantly to touch the Italians, and 
declared with resolution for a wine of Burgundy 
or the Medoc, rarely got beyond a Bourgeois 
vintage. 

Nevertheless though I aspired to be his tutor 
in wines I owed him more than is possible to say 
in the greater matters of education. My debt 
to him is really very big. It was, naturally 
enough, through his influence, that while I was 
still in my one room in Danvers Street I com- 
menced to read again all the Greek tragedies. 
By an odd chance I came across a clergyman's 
son in Chelsea who also had a certain passion for 
Greek. He used to come to my room and there 
we re-read the tragedies. Oddly enough I think 
my new friend never met Maitland, for Mait- 
land rarely came to my room save on Sundays, 
and those days I reserved specially for him. 
But whenever we met, either there or at 7 K, we 
always read or recited Greek to each other, and 
then entered into a discussion of the metrical 
value of the choruses — in which branch of learn- 
ing I trust I showed proper humility, for in 
prosody he was remarkably learned. As for me, 
I knew nothing of it beyond what he told me, 
and cared very little, personally, for the techni- 
cal side of poetry. Nevertheless it was not easy 
to resist Maitland's enthusiasm, and I succumbed 



84 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

to it so greatly that I at last imagined that I was 
really interested in what appealed so to him. 
Heaven knows, in those days I did at least learn 
something of the matter. 

We talked of rhythm, and of Arsis or Ictus. 
Pyrrhics we spoke of, and trochees and spondees 
were familiar on our lips. Especially did he 
declare that he had a passion for anapaests, and 
when it came to the actual metres, Choriambics 
and Galliambics were an infinite joy to him. 
He explained to me most seriously the differences 
between trimeter Iambics when they were cata- 
lectic, acatalectic, hypercatalectic. What he 
knew about comic tetrameter was at my service, 
and in a short time I knew, as I imagined, almost 
all that he did about Minor Ionic, Sapphic, and 
Alcaic verse. Once more these things are to me 
little more than words, and yet I never hear one 
of them mentioned — as one does occasionally 
when one comes across a characteristic enthusiast 
— but I think of Henry Maitland and his gravely 
joyous lectures to me on that vastly important 
subject. No doubt many people will think that 
such little details as these are worth nothing, 
but I shall have failed greatly in putting Mait- 
land down if they do not seem something in the 
end. These trifles are, after all, touches in the 
portrait as I see the man, and that they all meant 
much to him I know very well. To get through 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 85 

the early days of literary poverty one must have 
ambition and enthusiasm of many kinds. En- 
thusiasm alone is nothing, and ambition by itself 
is too often barren, but the two together are some- 
thing that the gods may fight against in vain. I 
know that this association with him, when I was 
his only friend, and he was my chief friend, was 
great for both of us, for he had much to endure, 
and I was not without my troubles. Yet we 
made fun together of our squalor, and rejoiced 
in our poverty, so long as it did not mean acute 
suffering; and when it did mean that, we often- 
times got something out of literature to help us 
to forget. On looking back, I know that many 
things happened which seem to me dreadful, but 
then they appeared but part of the day's work. 
It rarely happened that I went to him without 
some story of the week's happenings, to be told 
again in return something which had occurred to 
him. For instance, there was that story of the 
lady who asked him his experience with regard 
to the management of butlers. In return I could 
tell him of going out to dinner at houses where 
people would have been horrified to learn that I 
had eaten nothing that day, and possibly nothing 
the day before. For us to consort with the com- 
fortably situated sometimes seemed to both of us 
an intolerably fine jest, which was added to by 
the difference of these comfortable people from 



86 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

the others we knew. Here and there we came 
across some fatly rich person who, by accident, 
had once been deprived of his usual dinner. It 
seemed to give him a sympathetic feeling for the 
very poor. But, after all, though I did some- 
times associate with such people, I was happier 
in my own room with Maitland, or in his flat, 
where we discussed our iEschylus, or wrought 
upon metres or figures of speech — always a great 
joy to us. Upon these, too, Maitland was really 
quite learned. He was full of examples of 
brachyology. Anacoluthon he was well ac- 
quainted with. Not even Farrar, in his "Greek 
Syntax," or some greater man, knew more ex- 
amples of chiasmus, asyndeton, or hendiadys. 
In these byways he generally rejoiced, and we 
were never satisfied unless at each meeting, 
wherever it might be, we discovered some new 
phrase, or new word, or new quotation. 

Once at 7 K I quoted to him from Keats' 
"Endymion" the lines about those people who 
"unpen their baaing vanities to browse away the 
green and comfortable juicy hay of human 
pastures." All that evening he was denouncing 
various comfortable people who fed their baaing 
vanity on everything delightful. He declared 
they browsed away all that made life worth 
while, and in return for my gift to him of this 
noble quotation he produced something rather 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 87 

more astounding, and perhaps not quite so quot- 
able, out of Zola's ^'Nana." We had been talk- 
ing of realism, and of speaking the truth, of 
being direct, of not being mealy-mouthed; inl 
fact, of not letting loose ^'baaing vanities," and j 
suddenly he took down '^Nana'^ and said, ''Here 
Zola has put a phrase in her mouth which re- 
joices me exceedingly. It is a plain, straight- 
forward, absolutely characteristic sentiment, 
such as we in England are not allowed to repre- \ 
sent. Nana, on being remonstrated with by her ' 
lover-in-chief for her infidelities, returns him the , 
plain and direct reply, 'Quand je vois un homme ' 
qui me plait, je couche avec' " He went on to 
declare that writing any novels in England was 
indeed a very sickening business, but he added, 
"I really think we begin to get somewhat better , 
in this. However, up to the last few years, it 
has been practically impossible to write anything 
more abnormal about a man's relations with 
women than a mere bigamy." Things have cer- 
tainly altered, but I think he was one of those 
who helped to break down that undue sense ob 
the value of current morality which has done sol 
much harm to the study of life in general, and 
indeed to life itself. His general rage and quar- 
rel with that current morality, for which he had 
not only a contempt, but a loathing which often 
made him speechless, comes out well in what he 



88 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

thought and expressed about the Harold Fred- 
erick affair. There was, of course, as everybody 
knows, a second illegitimate family. While 
the good and orthodox made a certain amount 
of effort to help the wife and the legal children, 
they did their very best to ignore the second 
family. However, to Maitland's great joy, there 
were certain people, notably Mrs. Stephens, who 
did their very best for the other children and for 
the poor mother. Maitland himself subscribed, 
before he knew the actual position, to both fam- 
ilies, and betrayed extraordinary rage when he 
learnt how that second family had been treated, 
and heard of the endeavours of the ''unco' guid" 
to ignore them wholly. But then such actions 
and such hypocrisy are characteristic of the mid- 
dle class in this country and not in this country 
alone. He loathed their morals which became 
a system of cruelty; their greed and its concom- 
itant selfishness: their timidity which grows 
brutal in defence of a position to which only 
chance and their rapacity have entitled them. 

Apropos of his hatred of current morality, it is 
a curious thing that the only quarrel I ever had 
with him showed his early point of view rather 
oddly. Among the few men he knew there was 
one, with whom I was a little acquainted, who 
had picked up a young girl in a tavern and taken 
her to live with him. My own acquaintance 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 89 

with her led to some jealousy between me and 
the man who was keeping her, and he wrote to 
Maitland complaining of me, and telling him 
many things which were certainly untrue. 
Maitland when he considered the fact of his 
having ruined his own life for ever and ever by 
his relations with a woman of this order, had 
naturally built up a kind of theory of these things 
as a justification for himself. This may seem a 
piece of extravagant psychology, but I have not 
the least doubt that it is true. Without asking 
my view of the affair he wrote to me very an- 
grily, and declared that I had behaved badly. 
He added that he wished me to understand that 
he considered an affair of that description as 
sacred as any marriage. Though he was young, 
and in these matters no little of a prig, I was 
also young, and of a hot temper. That he had 
not made any inquiries of me, or even asked my 
version of the circumstances, so angered me that 
I wrote back to him saying that if he spoke to 
me in that way I should decline to have any- 
thing more to do with him. As he was con- 
vinced, most unjustly, that his view was entirely 
sound, this naturally enough led to an estrange- 
ment which lasted for the best part of a year, 
but I am glad to remember that I myself made 
it up by writing to him about one of his books. 
This was before I went to America, and al- 



90 HENRY MAITLAND 

though I was working, it was a great grief to me 
that we did not meet during this estrangement 
for any of our great talks, which, both then and 
afterwards, were part of my life, and no little 
part of it. Often when I think of him I recol- 
lect those lines of Callimachus to Heracleitus 
in Corey's ^^lonica": 

**They told me, Heracleitus, they told me you were dead ; 
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to 

shed. 
I wept as I remembered how often you and I 
Had tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the 
sky." 



CHAPTER IV 

IN the last chapter I quoted from Boswell, 
always a favourite of Maitland's, as he is 
of all true men of letters. But there is yet 
another quotation from the same work which 
might stand as a motto for this book, as it might 
for the final and authoritative biography of 
Maitland which perhaps will some day be done: 
*'He asked me whether he had mentioned, in any 
of the papers of the ^Rambler,' the description 
in Virgil of the entrance into Hell, with an ap- 
plication to the Press; 'for,' said he, 'I do not 
much remember them.' I told him, *No.' 
Upon which he repeated it: 

*Vesttbulum ante ipsum primisque in faucibus Orel, 
Luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curce; 
Pallentesque habitant Morbi, tristisque Senectus, 
Et Metus, et malesuada FameSj ac turpis Egestas; 
Terribiles vis forma: Letumque, Labosquef 

*Now,' said he, 'almost all these apply exactly 
to an author; all these are the concomitants of 
a printing-house.' " Nevertheless, although 
cares, and sometimes sullen sorrows, want and 
fear, still dwelt with Maitland, a little time now 

91 



92 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

began for him in which he had some peace of 
mind, if not happiness. That was a plant he 
j never cultivated. One of his favourite passages 
from Charlotte Bronte, whose work was in many 
Ways a passion to him, is that in which she ex- 
iclaims: "Cultivate happiness! Happiness is 
' not a potato," and indeed he never grew it. Still 
there were two periods in his life in which he 
had some peace, and the first period now began. 
I speak of the time after the death of his first 
wife. The drain of ten shillings a week — which 
must seem so absurdly little to many — had been 
far more than he could stand, and many times he 
had gone without the merest necessities of life 
so that the poor alien in the New Cut should 
have money, even though he knew that she 
spent it at once upon drink and forgetfulness. 
Ten shillings a week was very much to him. 
For one thing it might mean a little more food 
and better food. It meant following up his one 
great hobby of buying books. Those who know 
"The Meditations," know what he thought of 
books, for in that respect this record is a true 
guide, even if it should be read with caution in 
most things. Nevertheless although he was hap- 
pier and easier, it is curious that his most un- 
happy and despairing books were written during 
this particular period. "In the Morning," it 
is true, was done before his wife died, and some 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 93 

people who do not know the inner history of the 
book may not regard it as a tragedy. In one 
sense, however, it was one of the greatest literary 
tragedies of Henry Maitland's life, according 
to his own statement to me. 

At that time he was publishing books with the 
firm of Miller and Company, and, of course, he 
knew John Glass, who read for them, very well 
indeed. It seems that Glass, who had naturally 
enough, considering his period, certain old- 
fashioned ideas on the subject of books and their 
endings, absolutely and flatly declined to rec- 
ommend his firm to publish ''In the Morning," 
unless Maitland re-wrote the natural tragic end 
of the book and made it turn out happily. I 
think nothing on earth, or in some hell for men 
of letters, could have made Maitland more angry 
and wretched. If there was one thing that he 
clung to during the whole of his working time, it 
was sincerity, and sincerity in literary work im- 
plies an absolute freedom from alien and ex- 
trinsic influence. I can well remember what he 
said to me about Glass' suggestion. He abused 
him and the publishers; the public, England, 
the world, and the very universe. He almost 
burst into tears as he explained to me what he 
had been obliged to do for the sake of the great 
fifty pounds he was to get for the book. For 
at this time he only got fifty pounds for a long 



94. THE PRIVATE LIFE 

three-volume novel. He always wrote with the 
greatest pain and labour, but I do not suppose 
he ever put anything on paper in his life which 
cost him such acute mental suffering as the last 
three chapters of this book which were written 
to John Glass' barbaric order. 

After his wife's death he wrote *'The Under- 
World," "Bond and Free," "Paternoster Row," 
and "The Exile." It is a curious fact, although 
it was not always obvious even to himself, and 
is not now obvious to anybody but me, that I 
stood as a model to him in many of these books, 
especially, if I remember rightly, for one par- 
ticular character in "Bond and Free." Some of 
these sketches are fairly complimentary, and 
many are much the reverse. The reason of this 
use of me was that till much later he knew very 
few men intimately but myself; and when he 
wanted anybody in his books of a more or less 
robust character, and sometimes more or less of a 
kind that he did not like, I, perforce, had to stand 
for him. On one occasion he acknowledged 
this to me, and once he was not at all sure how 
I should take it. As a matter of fact the most 
life-like portrait of me ends as a villain, and, as 
he had touched me off to the very life in the first 
volume, it did make me a little sorer than I 
acknowledged. I leave the curious to discover 
this particular scoundrel. Of course it was only 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 95 

natural that my wild habits and customs, the 
relics of Australia and America, afforded him 
a great deal of amusement and study. On one 
occasion they cost him, temporarily, the very 
large sum of three pounds. As he said, he used 
to look upon me as a kind of hybrid, a very 
ridiculous v^ild man with strong literary lean- 
ings, with an enormous amount of general and 
unrelated knowledge; and at the same time as a 
totally unregulated or ill-regulated rufHan. 
This was a favourite epithet of his, for which I 
daresay there was something to be said. Now 
one Sunday it happened that I was going up to 
see him at 7 K, and came from Chelsea with 
two or three books in my hand, and, as it hap- 
pened, a pair of spectacles on my nose. At that 
time I sometimes carried an umbrella, and no 
doubt looked exceedingly peaceful. As a re- 
sult of this a young man, who turned out after- 
wards to be a professional cricketer, thought I 
was a very easy person to deal with, and to in- 
sult. As I came to York Place, which was then 
almost empty of passers by, I was walking close 
to the railings and this individual came up and 
pushing rudely past me, stepped right in front 
of me. Now this was a most outrageous pro- 
ceeding, because he had fifteen free feet of pave- 
ment, and I naturally resented it. I made a 
little longer step than I should otherwise have 



96 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

done and '^galled his kibe." He turned round 
upon me and, using very bad language, asked 
me where I was going to, who I thought I was, 
and what I proposed to do about it. I did not 
propose to do anything, but did it. I smote 
him very hard with the umbrella, knocking him 
down. He remained on the pavement for a 
considerable time, and then only got up at the 
third endeavour, and promptly gave me into 
custody. The policeman, who had happened 
to see the whole affair, explained to me, with 
that civility common among the custodians of 
order to those classes whose dress suggests they 
are their masters, that he was compelled to take 
the charge. I was removed to Lower Seymour 
Street and put in a cell for male prisoners only, 
where I remained fully half an hour. 

While I was in this cell a small boy of about 
nine was introduced and left there. I went 
over to him and said, ^'Hullo, my son, what's 
brought you here?" Naturally enough he im- 
agined that I was not a prisoner but a powerful 
official, and bursting into tears he said, ''Oh, 
please, sir, it warn't me as nicked the steak!" 
I consoled him to the best of my ability until I 
was shortly afterwards invited down to Marl- 
borough Street Police Court, where Mr. De 
Rutzen, now Sir Albert De Rutzen, was sitting. 
As I had anticipated the likelihood of my being 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 97 

fined, and as I had no more than a few shillings 
with me, I had written a letter to Maitland, and 
procuring a messenger through the police, had 
sent it up to him. He came down promptly 
and sat in the court while I was being tried for 
this assault. After hearing the case Mr. De 
Rutzen decided to fine me three pounds, which 
Maitland paid, with great chuckles at the inci- 
dent, even though he considered his prospect of 
getting the money back for some months was 
exceedingly vague. It was by no means the 
first time that he had gone to the police court 
for copy which '4s very pretty to observe," as 
Pepys said, when after the Fire of London it 
was discovered that as many churches as public 
houses were left standing in the city. That 
such a man should have had to pursue his studies 
of actual life in the police courts and the slums 
was really an outrage, another example of the 
native malignity of matter. For, as I have in- 
sisted, and must insist again, he was a scholar 
and a dreamer. But his pressing anxieties for 
ever forbade him to dream, or to pursue scholar- 
ship without interruption. He desired time to 
perfect his control of the English tongue, and 
he wanted much that no man can ever get. It 
is my firm conviction that if he had possessed 
the smallest means he would never have thought 
himself completely master of the medium in 



98 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

which he worked. He often spoke of poor 
Flaubert saying: "What an accursed language 
is French!" He was for ever dissatisfied with 
his work, as an artist should be, and I think he 
attained seldom, if ever, the rare and infrequent 
joy that an artist has in accomplishment. It 
was not only his desire of infinite perfection as a 
writer pure and simple, which affected and af- 
flicted him. It was the fact that he should never 
have written fiction at all. He often destroyed 
the first third of a book. I knew him to do so 
with one three times over. This, of course, was 
not always out of the cool persuasion that what 
he had done was not good, for it often was good 
in its way, but frequently he began, in a hurry, 
in despair, and with the prospects of starvation, 
something that he knew not to be his own true 
work, or something which he forced without 
adequate preparation. Then I used to get a 
dark note saying, "I have destroyed the whole of 
the first volume and am, I hope, beginning to 
see my way." It was no pleasant thing to be a 
helpless spectator of these struggles, in which 
he found no rest, when I knew his destiny was 
to have been a scholar at a great university. 

When one understands his character, or even 
begins to understand it, it is easy enough to com- 
prehend that the temporary ease with regard to 
money which came after his wife's death did not 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 99 

last so very long. The pressure of her immedi- 
ate needs and incessant demands being at last 
relaxed he himself relaxed his efforts in certain 
directions and presently was again in difficulties. 
I know that it will sound very extraordinary to 
all but those who know the inside of literary life 
that this should have been so. A certain amount 
of publicity is almost always associated in the 
minds of the public with monetary success of a 
kind. Yet one very well-known acquaintance 
of mine, an eminent if erratic journalist, one day 
had a column of favourable criticism in a big 
daily, and after reading it went out and bought 
a red herring with his last penny and cooked it 
over the fire in his solitary room. It was the 
same with myself. It was almost the same with 
Maitland even at this time. No doubt the 
worst of his financial difficulties were before I 
returned from America, and even before his wife 
died, but never, till the end of his life, was he at 
ease with regard to money. He never attained 
the art of the pot-boiler by which most of us 
survive, even when he tried short stories, which 
he did finally after I had pressed him to attempt 
them for some years. 

In many ways writing to him was a kind of 
sacred mission. It was not that he had any 
faith in great results to come from it, but the 
profession of a writer was itself sacred, and even 



100 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

the poorest sincere writer was a sacer vates. He 
once absolutely came down all the way to me in 
Chelsea to show me a well-known article in 
which Robert Louis Stevenson denied, to my 
mind not so unjustly, that a writer could claim 
payment at all, seeing that he left the world's 
work to do what he chose to do for his own pleas- 
ure. Stevenson went on to compare such a 
writer to a fille de joie. This enraged Maitland 
furiously. I should have been grieved if he and 
Stevenson had met upon that occasion. I really 
think something desperate might have happened, 
little as one might expect violence from such a 
curious apostle of personal peace as Maitland. 
Many years afterwards I related this little inci- 
dent to Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa, but I 
think by that time Maitland himself was half 
inclined to agree with his eminent brother au- 
thor. And yet, as I say, writing was a mission, 
even if it was with him an acquired passion; but 
his critical faculties, which were so keenly de- 
veloped, almost destroyed him. There can be 
no stronger proof that he was not one of those 
happy beings who take to the telling of stories 
because they must, and because it is in them. 
There was no time that he was not obliged to do 
his best, though every writer knows to his grief 
that there are times when the second best must 
do. And thus it was that John Glass so enraged 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 101 

him. All those things which are the care of the 
true writer were of most infinite importance to 
him. A misprint, a mere ^'literal/' gave him 
lasting pain. He desired classic perfection, 
both of work and the mere methods of produc- 
tion. He would have taken years over a book 
if fear and hunger and poverty had permitted 
him to do so. And yet he wrote ''Isabel," "The 
Mob," and "In the Morning," all in seven 
months, even while he read through the whole 
of Dante's "Divina Commedia," for recreation, 
and while he toiled at the alien labour of teach- 
ing. Yet this was he who wrote to one friend: 
"Would it not be delightful to give up a year or 
so to the study of some old period of English his- 
tory?" When he was thirty-six he said: "The 
four years from now to forty I should like to 
devote to a vigorous apprenticeship in English." 
But this was the man who year after year was 
compelled to write books which the very essence 
of his being told him would work no good. 
Sometimes I am tempted to think that the only 
relief he got for many, many years came out of 
the hours we spent in company, either in his 
room or mine. We read very much together, 
and it was our delight, as I have said, to ex- 
change quotations, or read each other passages 
which we had discovered during the week. He 
recited poetry with very great feeling and skill. 



102 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

and was especially fond of much of Coleridge. 
I can hear him now reading those lines of Cole- 
ridge to his son which end : 

"Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee 
Whether the summer clothe the general earth 
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing 
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch 
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch 
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall 
Heard only in the trances of the blast, 
Or if the secret ministry of frost 
Shall hang them up in silent icicles, 
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon." 

And to hear him chant the mighty verse of the 
great Greeks who were dead, and yet were most 
alive to him, was always inspiring. The time 
was to come, though not yet, when he was to see 
Greece, and when he had entered Piraeus and 
seen the peopled mountains of that country 
Homer became something more to him than he 
had been, and the language of ^schylus and 
Sophocles took on new glories and clothed itself 
in still more wondrous emotions. He knew a 
hundred choruses of the Greek tragedies by 
heart, and declaimed them with his wild hair 
flung back and his eyes gleaming as if the old 
tragedians, standing in the glowing sun of the 
Grecian summer, were there to hear him, an alien 
yet not an alien, using the tongue that gave its 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 103 

chiefest glories to them for ever. But he had 
been born in exile, and had made himself an 
outcast. 

Those who have read so far, and are interested 
in him, will see that I am much more concerned 
to say what I felt about him than to relate mere 
facts and dates. I care little or nothing that in 
some ways others know more or less of him, or 
know it differently. I try to build up my little 
model of him, try to paint my picture touch by 
touch; often, it may be, by repetition, for so a 
man builds himself for his friends in his life. I 
must paint him as a whole, and put him down, 
here and there perhaps with the grain of the 
canvas showing through the paint, or perhaps 
with what the worthy critics call a rich impasto, 
which may be compiled of words. Others may 
criticise, and will criticise, what I write. No 
doubt they will find much of it wrong, or wrong- 
headed, and will attribute to me other motives 
than those which move me, but if it leads them 
to bring out more of his character than I know 
or remember, I shall be content. For the more 
that is known of him, the more he will be loved. 

It was somewhere about this time that I un- 
dertook to write one of two or three articles 
which I have done about him for periodicals, 
and the remembrance of that particular piece of 
work reminds me very strongly of his own ideas 



104 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

of his own humour in writing. There have 
been many discussions, wise and otherwise, as 
to whether he possessed any at all, and I think 
the general feeling that he was very greatly lack- 
ing in this essential part of the equipment of a 
writer, to be on the whole true. Among my 
lost letters there was one which I most especially 
regret not to be able to quote, for it was very 
long, perhaps containing two thousand words, 
which he sent to me when he knew I had been 
asked to do this article. Now the purport of 
Maitland's letter was to prove to me that every 
one was wrong who said he had no humour. 
In one sense there can be no greater proof that 
anybody who said so was right. He enumerated 
carefully all the characters in all the books he 
had hitherto written in whom he thought there 
was real humour. He gave me a preposterous 
list of these individuals, with his comments, and 
appealed to me in all deadly seriousness to know 
whether I did not agree with him that they were 
humorous. But the truth is that, save as a talker, 
he had very little humour, and even then it was 
frequently verbal. It was, however, occasion- 
ally very grim, and its strength, oddly enough, 
was of the American kind, since it consisted of 
managed exaggeration. He had a certain joy 
in constructing more or less humorous nick- 
names for people. Sometimes these were good, 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 105 

and sometimes bad, but when he christened them 
once he kept to it always. I believe the only 
man of his acquaintance who had no nickname 
at all was George Meredith, but then he loved 
and admired Meredith in no common fashion. 
In some of his books he speaks, apparently not 
without some learning, of music, but there are, 
I fancy, signs that his knowledge of it was more 
careful construction than actual knowledge or 
deep feeling. Nevertheless he did at times dis- 
cover a real comprehension of the greater musi- 
cians, especially of Chopin. Seeing that this 
was so, it is very curious, and more than curious 
in a writer, that he had a measureless adora- 
tion of barrel organs. He delighted in them 
strangely, and when any Italian musician came 
into his dingy street or neighbourhood, he would 
set the window open and listen with ardour. 
Being so poor, he could rarely afford to give 
away money even in the smallest sum. Pen- 
nies were indeed pennies to him. But he did 
sometimes bestow pence on wandering Italians 
who ground out Verdi in the crowded streets. 
Among the many languages which he knew was, 
of course, Italian; for, as I have said, he read 
the "Divina Commedia" easily, reading it for 
relaxation as he did Aristophanes. It was a 
great pleasure to him, even before he went to 
Italy, to speak a few words in their own tongue 



106 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

to these Italians of the English streets. He re- 
membered that this music came from the south, 
the south that was always his Mecca, the Kibleh 
of the universe. Years afterwards, when he had 
been in the south, and knew Naples and the 
joyous crowds of the Chaiaja — long before I 
had been there and had listened to its uproar 
from the Belvidere of San Martino — he found 
Naples chiefly a city of this joyous popular 
music. Naples, he said, was the most interest- 
ing modern city in Europe ; and yet I believe the 
chief joy he had there was hearing its music, and 
the singing of the lazzaroni down by Santa 
Lucia, 'funiculi, Funicula," he loved as much 
as if it were the work of a classic, and '^Santa 
Lucia" appealed to him like a Greek chorus. I 
remember that, years later, he wrote to me a let- 
ter of absurd and exaggerated anger, which was 
yet perfectly serious, about the action of the Ne- 
apolitan municipality in forbidding street organs 
to play in the city. Sometimes, though rarely, 
seeing that he could not often afford a shilling, 
he went to great concerts in London. Certainly 
he spoke as one not without instruction in musical 
subjects in ^'The Vortex," but I fancy that musi- 
cal experts might find flaws in his nomenclature. 
Nevertheless he did love music with a certain 
ardent passion. 

He was a man not without a certain sensu- 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 107 

ality, but it was his sensuousness which was in 
many ways the most salient point in his char- 
acter. As I often told him, he was a kind of 
incomplete Rabelaisian. That was suggested to^ 
me by his delighted use of Gargantuan epithets 
with regard to the great recurrent subject of 
food. He loved all things which were redolent 
of oil and grease and fatness. The joy of great 
abundance appealed to him, and I verily believe 
that to him the great outstanding characteristic 
of the past in England was its abundant table. 
Indeed, in all things but rowdy indecency, he 
was a Rabelaisian, and being such, he yet had to 
put up with poor and simple food. However, 
provided it was at hand in large quantities, he 
was ready to feed joyously. He would exclaim : 
"Now for our squalid meal! I wonder what 
Harold Edgeworth, or good old Edmund Roden 
would say to this?" When I think of the mea- 
gre preface that Harold Edgeworth wrote in 
later years for "Basil," when that done by G. H. 
Rivers — afterwards published separately — did 
not meet with the approval of Maitland's rel- 
atives and executors, I feel that Edgeworth some- 
what deserved the implied scorn of Maitland's 
words. As for Edmund Roden, he often spoke 
of him affectionately. In later years he some- 
times went down to Felixstowe to visit him. He 
liked his house amazingly, and was very much 



108 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

at home in it. It was there that he met Grant 
Allen, and Sir Luke Redburn, whom he declared 
to be the most interesting people that he saw in 
Felixstowe at that time. 

I am not sure whether it was on this particular 
occasion, perhaps in 1895, that he went down to 
Essex with a great prejudice against Grant 
Allen. The reason of this was curious. He 
was always most vicious when any writer who 
obviously lived in comfort, complained loudly 
and bitterly of the pittance of support given 
him by the public, and the public's faithful 
servants, the publishers. When Allen growled 
furiously on this subject in a newspaper inter- 
view Maitland recalled to me with angry 
amusement a certain previous article in which, if 
I remember rightly. Grant Allen proclaimed his 
absolute inability to write if he were not in a 
comfortable room with rose-coloured curtains. 
*'Rose-coloured curtains!" said Maitland con- 
temptuously, and looking round his own room 
one certainly found nothing of that kind. It 
was perhaps an extraordinary thing, one of the 
many odd things in his character, that the man 
who loved the south so, who always dreamed of 
it, seemed to see everything at that period of his 
life in the merest black and white. There was 
not a spark or speck of colour in his rooms. 
Now in my one poor room in Chelsea I had hung 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 109 

up all sorts of water-colours acquired by various 
means from artists who were friends of mine. 
By hook or by crook I got hold of curtains with 
colour in them, and carpets, too, and Japanese 
fans. My room was red and yellow and scarlet, 
while his were a dingy monochrome, as if they 
sympathised with the outlook at the back of his 
flat, which stared down upon the inferno of the 
Metropolitan Railway. But to return to Grant 
Allen. Maitland now wrote : "However, I like 
him very much. He is quite a simple, and very 
gentle fellow, crammed with multifarious knowl- 
edge, enthusiastic in scientific pursuits. With 
fiction and that kind of thing he ought never to 
have meddled ; it is the merest pot-boiling. He 
reads nothing whatever but books of scientific 
interest." 

It was at Felixstowe, too, that he met Carew 
Latter who induced him to write twenty papers 
in one of the journals Latter conducted. They 
were to be of more or less disreputable London 
life. Some of them at least have been reprinted 
in his volumes of short stories. There is certainly 
no colour in them; in some ways they resemble 
sketches with the dry-point. Of course after he 
had once been on the continent, and had got south 
to Marseilles and the Cannebiere, he learnt to 
know what colour was, and wrote of it in a way 
he had never done before, as I noticed particu- 



110 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

larly in one paragraph about Capri seen at sunset 
from Naples. In this sudden discovery of colour 
he reminded me, oddly enough, of my old ac- 
quaintance Wynne, the now justly celebrated 
painter, who, up to a certain time in his life, had 
painted almost in monochrome, and certainly in 
a perpetual grey chord. Then he met Marvell, 
the painter, who was, if anything, a colourist. I 
do not think Marvell influenced Wynne in any- 
thing but colour, but from that day Wynne was 
a colourist, and so remains, although to it he has 
added a great and real power of design and dec- 
oration. It is true that Maitland never became 
a colourist in writing, but those who have read 
his work with attention will observe that after a 
certain date he was much more conscious of the 
world's colour. 

In those days our poverty and our ambition 
made great subjects for our talks. I myself had 
been writing for some years with no more than a 
succes d^estime, and I sometimes thought that I 
would throw up the profession and go back to 
Australia or America, or to the sea, or would try 
Africa at last. But Maitland had no such pos- 
sibilities within him. He maintained grimly, 
though not without humour, that his only pos- 
sible refuge when war, or some other final dis- 
aster made it impossible for writers to earn their 
difficult living, was a certain block of buildings 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 111 

opposite 7 K. This, however, was not Madame 
Tussaud's as the careless might imagine, it was 
the Marylebone workhouse, which he said he re- 
garded with a proprietary eye. It always af- 
forded him a subject for conversation when his 
prospects seemed rather poorer than usual. It 
was, at any rate, he declared, very handy for him 
when he became unable to do more work. No 
doubt this was his humour, but there was some- 
thing in this talk which was more than half 
serious. He always liked to speak of the gloomy 
side of things, and I possess many letters of his 
which end with references to the workhouse, or 
to some impending, black disaster. In one he 
said: ^'I wish I could come up, but am too low 
in health and spirits to move at present. A cold 
clings about me, and the future looks dark." 
Again he said : ''No, I shall never speak of my 
work. It has become a weariness and toil — 
nothing more." And again: ''It is a bad, bad 
business, that of life at present." And yet once 
more: "It is idle to talk about occupation — by 
now I have entered on the last stage of life's 
journey." This was by no means when he had 
come towards the end of his life. However, 
the workhouse does come up, even at the end, 
in a letter written about two months before his 
death. He wrote to me: "I have been turning 
the pages with great pleasure, to keep my 



112 HENRY MAITLAND 

thoughts from the workhouse." Those who did 
not know him would not credit him with the 
courage of desperation which he really possessed, 
if they saw his letters and knew nothing more of 
the man. 



CHAPTER V 

THE art of portraiture, whether in words 
or paint, is very difficult, and appears 
less easy as I attempt to draw Maitland. 
Nevertheless the time comes when the artist 
seems to see his man standing on his feet before 
him, put down in his main planes, though not 
yet, perhaps, with any subtlety. The anatomy is 
suggested at any rate, if there are bones in the 
subject or in the painter. As it seems to me, 
Maitland should now stand before those who 
have read so far with sympathy and understand- 
ing. I have not finished my drawing, but it 
might even now suffice as a sketch, and seem 
from some points of view to be not wholly inade- 
quate. It is by no means easy to put him down in 
a few words, but patience and the addition of 
detail reach their end, it may be not without 
satisfaction — for "with bread and steel one gets 
to China." It is not possible to etch Maitland 
in a few lines, for as it seems to me it is the little 
details of his character with which I am most 
concerned that give him his greatest value. It 
is not so much the detail of his actual life, but the 

113 



114 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

little things that he said, and the way he seemed 
to think, or even the way that he avoided think- 
ing, which I desire to put down. And when I 
say those things he wished not to think of, I am 
referring more especially to his views of the uni- 
verse, and of the world itself, those views which 
are a man's philosophy, and not less his philos- 
ophy when of set purpose he declines to think 
of them at all, for this Maitland did without any 
doubt. Goethe said, when he spoke, if I re- 
member rightly, about all forms of religious and 
metaphysical speculation, ''Much contemplation, 
or brooding over these things is disturbing to the 
spirit." Unfortunately I do not know German 
so I cannot find the reference to this, but Mait- 
land, who knew the language very thoroughly 
and had read nearly everything of great impor-. 
tance in it, often quoted this passage, having nat- 
urally a great admiration for Goethe. I do not 
mean that he admired him merely for his posi- 
tion in the world of letters. What he did admire 
in Goethe was what he himself liked and desired 
so grdatly. He wished for peace, for calmness 
of spirit. He did not like to be disturbed in any 
way whatsoever. He would not disturb him- 
self. He wished people to be reasonable, and 
thought this was a reasonable request to make of 
them. I remember on one occasion when I had 
been listening to him declaiming about some 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 115 

one's peculiar lack of reasonableness, which 
seemed to him the one great human quality, that 
I said: ^^Maitland, what would you do if you 
were having trouble with a woman who was in a 
very great rage with you?'' He replied, with an 
air of surprise, 'Why, of course, I should reason 
with her." I said shortly, ''Don't ever get mar- 
ried again!" Nevertheless he was a wonder- 
fully patient and reasonable man himself, and 
truly lacked everything characteristic of the com- 
batant. He would discuss, he would never 
really argue. I do not suppose that he was phys- 
ically a coward, but his dread of scenes and phys- 
ical violence lay very deep in his organisation. 
Although he used me as a model I never really 
drew him at length in any of my own books, but 
naturally he was a subject of great psychological 
interest to me. Pursuing my studies in him I 
said, one day, "Maitland, what would you do if 
a man disagreed with you, got outrageously and 
unreasonably angry, and slapped you in the 
face?" He replied, in his characteristically low 
and concentrated voice, "Do? I should look at 
him with the most infinite disgust, and turn 
away." 

His horror of militarism was something al- 
most comic, for it showed his entire incapacity 
for grasping the world's situation as it shows it- 
self to any real and ruthless student of political 



116 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

sociology who is not bogged in the mud flats of 
some Utopian island. Once we were together on 
the Horse Guards' Parade and a company of the 
Guards came marching up. We stood to watch 
them pass, and when they had gone by he turned 
to me and said, ''Mark you, my dear man, this, 
this is the nineteenth century!" In one of his 
letters written to me after his second marriage 
he said of his eldest son: ''I hope to send him 
abroad, to some country where there is no possi- 
bility of his having to butcher or be butchered." 
This, of course, was his pure reason pushed to the 
point where reason becomes mere folly, for such 
is the practical antinomy of pure reason in life. 
It was in this that he showed his futile ideal- 
ism, which was in conflict with what may be 
called truly his real pessimism. That he did good 
work in many of his books dealing with the lower 
classes is quite obvious, and cannot be denied. 
He showed us the things that exist. It is per- 
fectly possible, and even certainly true, that many 
of the most pessimistic writers are in reality opti- 
mists. They show us the grey in order that we 
may presently make it rose. But Maitland wrote 
absolutely without hope. He took his subjects 
as mere subjects, and putting them on the table, 
lectured in pathology. He made books of his 
dead-house experiences, and sold them, but never 
believed that he, or any other man, could really 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 117 

do good by speaking of what he had seen and 
dilated upon. The people as a body were vile 
and hopeless. He did not even inquire how they 
became so. He thought nothing could be done, 
and did not desire to do it. His future was in 
the past. The world's great age would never 
renew itself, and only he and a few others really 
understood the desperate state into which things 
had drifted. Since his death there has been 
some talk about his religion. I shall speak of 
this later, on a more fitting occasion ; but, truly 
speaking, he had no religion. When he gave up 
his temporary Positivist pose, which was entirely 
due to his gratitude to Harold Edgeworth for 
helping him, he refused to think of these things 
again. They disturbed the spirit. If I ever en- 
deavoured to inveigle him into a discussion or an 
argument upon any metaphysical subject he grew 
visibly uneasy. He declined to argue, or even to 
discuss, and though I know that in later life he 
admitted that even immortality was possible I 
defy any one to bring a tittle of evidence to show 
that he ever went further. This attitude to all 
forms of religious and metaphysical thought was 
very curious to me. It was, indeed, almost inex- 
plicable, as I have an extreme pleasure in specu- 
lative inquiry of all kinds. The truth is that on 
this side of his nature he was absolutely wanting. 
Such things interested him no more than music 



118 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

interests a tone-deaf man who cannot distinguish 
the shriek of a tom-cat from the sound of a violin. 
If I did try to speak of such things he listened 
with an air of outraged and sublime patience 
which must have been obvious to any one but a 
bore. Whether his philosophy was sad or not, 
he would not have it disturbed. 

His real interest in religion seemed to lie in his 
notion that it was a curious form of delusion 
almost ineradicable from the human mind. 
There is a theory, very popular among votaries of 
the creeds, which takes the form of denying that 
any one can really be an atheist. This is cer- 
tainly not true, but it helps one to understand the 
theologic mind, which has an imperative desire 
to lay hold of something like an inclusive hypoth- 
esis to rest on. So far as Maitland was con- 
cerned there was no* more necessity to have an 
hypothesis about God than there was to have one 
about quaternions, and quaternions certainly did 
not interest him. He shrugged his shoulders 
and put these matters aside, for in many things 
he had none of the weaknesses of humanity, 
though in others he had more than his share. In 
his letters to G. H. Rivers, which I have had the 
privilege of reading, there are a few references to 
Rivers' habits and powers of speculation. I think 
it was somewhere in 1900 or 1901 that he read 
"Forecasts." By this time he had a strong feel- 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 119 

ing of affection for Rivers, and a very great ad- 
miration for him. His references to him in the 
"Meditations" are sufficiently near the truth to 
corroborate this. Nevertheless his chief feeling 
towards Rivers and his work, beyond the mere 
fact that it was a joy to him that a man could 
make money by doing good stuff, was one of 
amazement and surprise that any one could be 
deeply interested in the future, and could give 
himself almost wholly or even with partial en- 
ergy, to civic purposes. And so he wrote to 
Rivers: "I must not pretend to care very much 
about the future of the human race. Come what 
may, folly and misery are sure to be the prevalent 
features of life, but your ingenuity in speculation, 
the breadth of your views, and the vigour of your 
writing, make this book vastly enjoyable. The 
critical part of it satisfies, and often delights me. 
Stupidity should have a sore back for some time 
to come, and many a wind-bag will be uneasily 
aware of collapse." 

It is interesting to note, now that I am speak- 
ing of his friendship for Rivers, and apropos of 
what I shall have to say later about his religious 
views, that he wrote to Rivers : "By the bye, you 
speak of God. Well, I understand what you 
mean, but the word makes me stumble rather. I 
have grown to shrink utterly from the use of such 
terms, and though I admit, perforce, a universal 



120 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

law, I am so estranged by its unintelligibility 
that not even a desire to be reverent can make 
those old names in any w^ay real to me." So 
later he said that he v^as at a loss to grasp what 
Rivers meant when he wrote: ^'There stirs 
something within us now that can never die 
again." I think Maitland totally misinterpreted 
the passage, which was rather apropos of the 
awakening of the civic spirit in mankind than of 
anything else, but he went on to say that he put 
aside the vulgar interpretation of such words. 
However, was it Rivers' opinion that the ma- 
terial doom of the earth did not involve the doom 
of earthly life? He added that Rivers' declared 
belief in the coherency and purpose of things was 
pleasant to him, for he himself could not doubt 
for a moment that there was some purpose. This 
is as far as he ever went. On the other hand, he 
did doubt whether we, in any sense of the pro- 
noun, should ever be granted understanding of 
that purpose. Of course all this shows that he 
possessed no metaphysical endowments or appa- 
ratus. He loved knowledge pure and simple, but 
when it came to the exercises of the metaphysical 
mind he was pained and puzzled. He lacked 
any real education in philosophy, and did not 
even understand its peculiar vocabulary. How- 
ever vain those of us who have gone through the 
metaphysical mill may think it in actual prod- 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 121 

ucts, we are all yet aware that it helps greatly 
to formulate our own philosophy, or even our 
own want of it. For it clears the air. It cuts 
away all kinds of undergrowth. It at any rate 
shows us that there is no metaphysical way out, 
for the simple reason that there has never existed 
one metaphysician who did not destroy another. 
They are all mutually destructive. But Mait- 
land had no joy in construction or destruction; 
and, as I have said, he barely understood the 
technical terms of metaphysics. There was a 
great difference with regard to these inquiries 
between him and Rivers. The difference was 
that Rivers enjoyed metaphysical thinking and 
speculation where Maitland hated it. But all 
the same Rivers took it up much too late in life, 
and about the year 1900 made wonderful dis- 
coveries which had been commonplaces to Ar- 
istotle. A thing like this would not have mat- 
tered much if he had regarded it as education. 
However, he regarded it as discovery, and wrote 
books about it which inspired debates, and ap- 
parently filled the metaphysicians with great joy. 
It is always a pleasure to the evil spirit that for 
ever lives in man to see the ablest people of the 
time showing that they are not equally able in 
some other direction than that in which they have 
gained distinction. 

It is curious how this native dislike of Mait- 



122 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

land to being disturbed by speculative thought 
comes out in a criticism he made of Thomas 
Hardy. He had always been one of this writer's 
greatest admirers, and I know he especially loved 
"The Woodlanders," but he wrote in a letter to 
Dr. Lake something very odd about "Jude the 
Obscure." He calls it: "a sad book! Poor 
Thomas is utterly on the wrong tack, and I fear 
he will never get back into the right one. At his 
age, a habit of railing at the universe is not over- 
come." Of course this criticism is wholly with- 
out any value as regards Hardy's work, but it is 
no little side light on Maitland's own peculiar 
habits of thought, or of persistent want of 
thought, on the great matters of speculation. 
His objection was not to anything that Hardy 
said, but to the fact that the latter's work, filled 
with what Maitland calls "railing at the uni- 
verse," personally disturbed him. Anything 
which broke up his little semi-classic universe, 
the literary hut which he had built for himself as 
a shelter from the pitiless storm of cosmic in- 
fluences, made him angry and uneasy for days 
and weeks. He never lived to read Hardy's 
"Dynasts," a book which stands almost alone in 
literature, and is to my mind a greater book than 
Goethe's "Faust," but if he had read it I doubt if 
he would have forgiven Thomas Hardy for dis- 
turbing him. He always wanted to be left alone. 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 123 

He had constructed his pattern of the universe, 
and any one who shook it he denounced with, 
"Confound the fellow! He makes me un- 
happy." The one book that he did read, which 
is in itself essentially a disturbing book to many 
people, and apparently read with some pleasure, 
was the earliest volume of Dr. Frazer's "Golden 
Bough" ; but it is a curious thing that what in- 
terested him, and indeed actually pleased him, 
was Frazer's side attacks upon the dogmas of 
Christianity. He said: "The curious thing 
about Frazer's book is, that in illustrating the old 
religious usages connected with tree-worship and 
so on, he throws light upon every dogma of 
Christianity. This by implication; he never 
does it expressly. Edmund Roden has just 
pointed this oiit to the Folk-lore Society, with 
the odd result that Gladstone wrote at once re- 
signing membership." This was written after 
Gladstone died, but it reads as if Maitland was 
not aware that he was dead. Odd as it may 
seem, it is perfectly possible that he did not know 
it. He cared very little for the newspapers, and 
sometimes did not read any for long periods. 
It is rather curious that when I proved to him 
in later years that he had once dated his letters 
according to the Positivist Calendar, he seemed 
a little disturbed and shocked. Still, it was very 
natural that when exposed to Positivist influ- 



124 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

ences he should have become a Positivist, for 
among the people of that odd faith, if faith it 
can be called, he found both kindness and intel- 
lectual recognition. But when his mind became 
clearer and calmer, and something of the storm 
and stress had passed by, he was aware that his 
attitude had been somewhat pathologic, and did 
not like to recall it. This became very much 
clearer to him, and indeed to me, when another 
friend of ours, a learned and very odd German 
who lived and starved in London, went com- 
pletely under in the same curious religious way. 
His name was Schmidt. He remained to the 
day of Maitland's death a very great friend of 
his, and I believe he possesses more letters from 
Henry Maitland than any man living — greatly 
owing to his own vast Teutonic energy and in- 
dustry in writing to his friends. 

But in London Schmidt came to absolute desti- 
tution. I myself got to know him through Mait- 
land. It appeared that he owned a collie dog, 
which he found at last impossible to feed, even 
though he starved himself to do so. Maitland 
told me of this, and introduced me to Schmidt. 
On hearing his story, and seeing the dog, I went 
to my own people, who were then living in Clap- 
ham, and asked them if they would take the 
animal from Schmidt and keep it. When I saw 
the German again I was given the dog, together 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 125 

with a paper on which were written all Don's 
peculiar tricks, most of which had been taught 
to him by his master and needed the German 
language for their words of command. Soon 
after this Schmidt fell into even grimmer pov- 
erty, and was rescued from the deepest gulf by 
some religious body analogous in those days to 
the Salvation Army of the present time. Of 
this Maitland knew nothing, until one day going 
down the Strand he found his friend giving away 
religious pamphlets at the door of Exeter Hall. 
When he told me this he said he went next day 
to see the man in his single room lodging and 
found him sitting at the table with several open 
Bibles spread out before him. He explained 
that he was making a commentary on the Bible 
at the instigation of one of his new friends, and 
he added: "Here, here is henceforth my life's 
work." Shortly after this, I believe through 
Harold Edgeworth or some one else to whom 
Maitland appealed, the poor German was given 
work in some quasi-public institution, and with 
better fare and more ease his brain recovered. 
He never mentioned religion again. It was thus 
that Maitland himself recovered from similar 
but less serious influences in somewhat similar 
conditions. For some weeks in 1885 I was my- 
self exposed to such influences in Chicago, in 
even bitterer conditions than those from which 



126 HENRY MAITLAND 

Schmidt and Maitland had suffered, but not for 
one moment did I alter my opinions. As a kind 
of final commentary on this chapter and this side 
of Maitland's mind, one might quote from a 
letter to Rivers: ^'Seeing that mankind cannot 
have done altogether with the miserable mystery 
of life, undoubtedly it behoves us before all else 
to enlighten as we best can the lot of those for 
whose being we are responsible. This for the 
vast majority of men — a few there are, I think, 
who are justified in quite neglecting that view 
of life, and, by the bye, Marcus Aurelius was 
one of them. Nothing he could have done 
would have made Commodus other than he was 
' — I use, of course, the everyday phrases, regard- 
less of determinism — and then one feels pretty 
sure that Commodus was not his son at all. For 
him, life was the individual, and whether he has 
had any true influence or not, I hold him abso- 
lutely justified in thinking as he did." There 
again comes out Maitland's view, his anti-social 
view, the native egoism of the man, his peculiar 
solitude of thought. 



CHAPTER VI 

TO have seen ^'Shelley plain" once only is 
to put down a single point on clear pa- 
per. To have seen him twice gives his 
biographer the right to draw a line. Out of 
three points may come a triangle. Out of the 
many times in many years that I saw Maitland 
comes the intricate pattern of him. I would 
rather do a little book like ^^Manon Lescaut" 
than many biographical quartos lying as heavy 
on the dead as Vanbrugh's mansions. If there 
are warts on Maitland so there were on Crom- 
well. I do not invent like the old cartogra- 
phers, who adorned their maps with legends say- 
ing, ''Here is much gold," or ''Here are found 
diamonds." Nor have I put any imaginary 
"Mountains of the Moon" into his map, or 
adorned vacant parts of ocean with whales or 
wonderful monsters. I put down nothing un- 
seen, or most reasonably inferred. In spite of 
my desire, which is sincere, to say as little as pos- 
sible about myself, I find I have to speak some- 
times of things primarily my own. There is no 
doubt it did Maitland a great deal of good to 

127 



128 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

have somebody to interest himself in, even if it 
w^ere no one of more importance than myself. 
Although he was so singularly a lonely man, he 
could not always bury himself in the classics, or 
even in his work, done laboriously in eight pro- 
digious hours. We for ever talked about what 
we were going to do, and there was very little 
that I wrote, up to the time of his leaving Lon- 
don permanently, which I did not discuss with 
him. Yet I was aware that with much I wrote 
he was wholly dissatisfied. I remember when I 
was still living in Chelsea, not in Danvers Street 
but in Redburn Street, where I at last attained 
the glory of two rooms, he came to me one Sun- 
day in a very uneasy state of mind. He looked 
obviously worried and troubled, and was for a 
long time silent as he sat over the fire. I asked 
him again and again what was the matter, be- 
cause, as can be easily imagined, I always had 
the notion that something must be the matter 
with him, or soon would be. In answer to my 
repeated importunities he said, at last: 'Well, 
the fact of the matter is, I want to speak to you 
about your work." It appeared that I and my 
affairs were at the bottom of his discomfort. 
He told me that he had been thinking of my 
want of success, and that he had made up his 
mind to tell me the cause of it. He was nervous 
and miserable, though I begged him to speak 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 129 

freely, but at last got out the truth. He told 
me that he did not think I possessed the quali- 
ties to succeed at the business I had so rashly 
commenced. He declared that it was not that 
he had not the very highest opinion of such a 
book as ''The Western Trail," but as regards 
fiction he felt I was bound to be a failure. 
Those who knew him can imagine what it cost 
him to say as much as this. I believe he would 
have preferred to destroy half a book and begin 
it again. Naturally enough what he said I 
found very disturbing, but I am pleased to say 
that I took it in very good part, and told him 
that I would think it over seriously. As may be 
imagined, I did a great deal of thinking on 
the subject, but the result of my cogitations 
amounted to this; I had started a thing and 
meant to go through with it at all costs. I wrote 
this to him later, and the little incident never 
made any difference whatever to our affection- 
ate friendship. I reminded him many years 
after of what he had said, and he owned then 
that I had done something to make him revise 
his former opinion. When I come to speak of 
some of his letters to me about my later books it 
will be seen how generous he could be to a friend 
who, for some time then, had not been very en- 
thusiastic about his own work. I have said be- 
fore, and I always believed, that it was he and 



130 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

not myself who was at the wrong kind of task. 
Fiction, even as he understood it, was not for a 
man of his nature and faculties. He would 
have been in his true element as a don of a col- 
lege, and much of his love of the classics was a 
mystery to me, as it would have been to most 
active men of the world, however well educated. 
I did understand his passion for the Greek 
tragedies, but he had almost more delight in the 
Romans ; and, with the exception of Catullus and 
Lucretius, the Latin classics are to me without 
any savour. There is no doubt that in many 
ways I was but a barbarian to him. For one 
thing, at that time I was something of a fanatical 
imperialist. He took no more interest in the 
Empire, except as literary material, than he did 
in Nonconformist theology. Then I was cer- 
tainly highly patriotic as regards England, but 
he was very cosmopolitan. It was no doubt a 
very strange thing that he should have spoken 
to me about my having little faculty for writing 
fiction when I had so often come to the same 
silent conclusion about himself. Naturally 
enough I did not dare to tell him so, for if such 
a pronouncement had distressed me a little it 
would distress him very much more. Yet I 
think he did sometimes understand his real limi- 
tations, especially in later years, when he wrote 
more criticism. The man who could say that 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 131 

he was prepared to spend the years from thirty- 
six to forty in a vigorous apprenticeship to 
English, was perfectly capable of continuing 
that apprenticeship until he died. 

He took a critical and wonderful interest in 
the methods of all men of letters, and that par- 
ticular interest with regard to Balzac, which 
was known to many, has sometimes been mis- 
taken. Folks have said, and even written, that 
he meant to write an English "Comedie Hu- 
maine." There is, no doubt, a touch of truth in 
this notion, but no more than a touch. He 
would have liked to follow in Balzac's mighty 
footsteps, and do something for England which 
would possibly be inclusive of all social grades. 
At any rate he began at the bottom and worked 
upwards. It is quite obvious to me that what 
prevented him from going further in any such 
scheme was not actually a want of power or any 
failure of industry, it was a real failure of knowl- 
edge and of close contact with the classes compos- 
ing the whole nation. Beyond the lower middle 
class his knowledge was not very deep. He was 
mentally an alien, and a satiric if interested in- 
truder. He had been exiled for the unpardona- 
ble sins of his youth. It is impossible for any man 
of intellect not to suspect his own limitations, and 
I am sure he knew that he should have been a 
pure child of books, for as soon as he got beyond 



132 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

the pale of his own grim surroundings, those sur- 
roundings which had been burnt, and were still 
being burnt into his soul, he apparently lost in- 
terest. Though two or three of these later books 
have indeed much merit, such novels as ''The 
Vortex'' and 'The Best of All Things" are really 
failures. I believe he felt it. Anthony Hope 
Hawkins once wrote to me apropos of some- 
thing, that there were very few men writing who 
really knew that all real knowledge had to be 
"bought." Maitland had bought his knowledge 
of sorrow and suffering and certain surroundings 
at a personal price that few can pay and not be 
bankrupt. But while I was associating with al- 
most every class in the world he lived truly 
alone. There were, indeed, long months when he 
actually saw no one, and there were other peri- 
ods when his only friend besides myself was 
that philosophic German whose philosophy put 
its lofty tail between its legs on a prolonged 
starvation diet. 

As one goes on talking of him and considering 
his nature there are times when it seems amazing 
that he did not commit suicide and have done 
with it. Certainly there were days and seasons 
when I thought this might be his possible end. 
But some men break and others bend, and in him 
there was undoubtedly some curious strength 
though it were but the Will to Live of Schopen- 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 133 

hauer, the one philosopher he sometimes read, v 
I myself used to think that it was perhaps his 
native sensuousness which kept him alive in spite 
of all his misery. No man ever lived who en- 
joyed things that were even remotely enjoyable 
more acutely than himself, though I think his 
general attitude towards life was like his attitude 
towards people and the world. For so many 
good men Jehovah would have spared the Cities 
of the Plains. So in a certain sense the few good 
folk that he perceived in any given class made 
him endure the others that he hated, while he 
painted those he loved against their dingy and 
dreadful background. The motto on the 
original title-page of 'The Under World" was 
a quotation from a speech by Renan delivered at 
the Academic Frangaise in 1889: 'Ta peinture 
d'un fumier peut etre justifiee pourvu qu'il y 
pousse une belle fleur; sans cela, le fumier n'est 
que repoussant." The few beautiful flowers of , 
the world for Henry Maitland were those who 
hated their surroundings and desired vainly to 
grow out of them. Such he pitied, hopeless as 
he believed their position, and vain as he knew 
to be their aspirations. In a way all this was 
nothing but translated self-pity. Had he been 
more fortunate in his youth I do not believe he 
would have ever turned his attention in any way 
towards social affairs, in which he took no native 



134 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

interest. His natural sympathy was only for 
those whom he could imagine to be his mental 
fellows. Almost every sympathetic character in 
all his best books was for him like the starling 
in the cage of Sterne — the starling that cried, ''I 
can't get out! I can't get out!" Among the 
subjects that he refused to speak of or to discuss 
was one which for a long time greatly interested 
me, and interests me still — I refer to Socialism. 
But then Socialism, after all, is nothing but a 
more or less definitive view of a definite organ- 
isation with perfectly recognised ends, and he 
saw no possibility of any organisation doing 
away with the things he loathed. That is to say, 
he was truly hopeless, most truly pessimistic. 
He was a sensuous and not a scientific thinker, 
and to get on with him for any length of time it 
was necessary for me to suppress three-quarters 
of the things I wished to speak about. He was 
a strange egoist, though truly the hateful world 
was not his own. It appeared to me that he 
prayed, or strove, for the power to ignore it. It 
is for this reason that it seems to me now that all 
his so-called social work and analysis were in 
the nature of an alien tour de force. He bent 
his intellect in that direction, and succeeded even 
against his nature. He who desired to be a 
Bentley or a Porson wrote bitterly about the 
slums of Tottenham Court Road. With Porson 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 135 

he damned the nature of things, and wrote beau- 
tifully about them. I remember on one occasion 
telling him of a piece of script in the handwrit- 
ing of the great surgeon, John Hunter, which 
ran: ^^Damn civilisation! It makes cats eat 
their kittens, sows eat their young, and women 
send their children out to nurse." I think that 
gave him more appreciation of science than any- 
thing he had ever heard. For it looked back 
into the past, and for Henry Maitland the past 
was the age of gold. In life, as he had to live 
it, it was impossible to ignore the horrors of the 
present time. He found it easier to ignore the 
horrors of the past, and out of ancient history he 
made his great romance, which, truly, he never 
wrote. 

It is a curious thing that a man who was thus 
so essentially romantic should have been mis- 
taken, not without great reason, for a realist. 
In one sense he was a realist, but this was the 
fatal result of his nature and his circumstances. 
Had he lived in happier surroundings, still writ- 
ing fiction, I am assured it would have been ro- 
mance. And yet, curiously enough, I doubt if 
any of his ideas concerning women were at all 
romantic. His disaster with his first wife wa» 
due to early and unhappily awakened sex feel- 
ing, but I think he believed that his marrying 
her was due to his desire to save somebody whom 



136 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

he considered to be naturally a beautiful char- 
acter from the dunghill in which he found her. 
This poor girl was his first belle fleur. In all 
his relations with women it seems as if his own 
personal loneliness was the dominating factor. 
So much did he feel these things that it was 
rarely possible to discuss them with him. 
Nevertheless it was the one subject, scientifically 
treated, on which I could get him to listen to 
me. In the first five years of my literary ap- 
prenticeship I began a book, which is still un- 
finished, and never will be finished, called "So- 
cial Pathology." So far as it dealt with sex 
and sex deprivation, he was much interested in 
it. In all his books there is to be found the mis- 
ery of the man who lives alone and yet cannot 
live alone. I do not think that in any book but 
^'The Unchosen," he ever made a study of that 
from the woman's side. But it is curiously char- 
acteristic of his sex view that the chief feminine 
character of that book apparently knew not love 
even when she thought that she knew it, but was 
only aware of awakened senses. 

One might have imagined, considering his 
early experiences, that he would have led the 
ordinary life of man, and associated, if only oc- 
casionally, with women of the mercenary type. 
This, I am wholly convinced, was a thing he 
never did, though I possess one poem which im- 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 137 

plies the possible occurrence of such a passing 
liaison. There was, however, another incident 
in his life which occurred not long before I went 
to America. He was then living in one room in 
the house of a journeyman bookbinder. On sev- 
eral occasions when I visited him there I saw 
his landlady, a young and not unpleasing woman, 
who seemed to take great interest in him, and 
did her very best to make him comfortable in 
narrow, almost impossible, surroundings. Her 
husband, a man a great deal older than herself, 
drank, and not infrequently ill-treated her. 
This was not wholly Maitland's story, for I saw 
the man myself, as well as his wife. It appears 
she went for sympathy to her lodger, and he told 
her something of his own troubles. Their com- 
mon griefs threw them together. She was ob- 
viously of more than the usual intelligence of 
her class. It appeared that she desired to learn 
French, or made Maitland believe so; my own 
view being that she desired his company. The 
result of this was only natural, and soon after- 
wards Maitland was obliged to leave the house 
owing to the jealousy of her husband, who for 
many years had already been suspicious of her 
without any cause. But this affair was only 
passing. He took other rooms, and so far as I 
know never saw her again. 

While I was in America he was living at 7 K, 



138 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

and in that gloomy flat there was an affair of 
another order, an incident not without many 
parallels in the lives of poor artists and writers. 
It seems that a certain lady not without im- 
portance in society, the wife of a rich husband, 
wrote to him about one of his books, and hav- 
ing got into correspondence with him allowed 
her curiosity to overcome her discretion. She 
visited him very often in his chambers, and 
though he told me but little I gathered what the 
result was. Oddly enough, by a curious chain of 
reasoning and coincidence, I afterwards discov- 
ered this woman's name, which I shall, of course, 
suppress. So far as I am aware these were the 
only two romantic or quasi-romantic incidents in 
Maitland's life until towards the end of it. 
When I came back from America he certainly 
had no mistress, and beyond an occasional visit 
from the sons of Harold Edgeworth, he prac- 
tically received no one but myself. His poverty 
forbade him entertaining any but one of his fel- 
lows who was as poor as he was, and the few 
acquaintances he had once met in better sur- 
roundings than his own gradually drifted away 
from him, or died as Cotter Morison died. Al- 
though he spoke so very little about these matters 
of personal loneliness and deprivation I was yet 
conscious from the general tenor of his writing 
and an occasional dropped word, how bitterly he 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 139 

felt it personally. It had rejoiced my unre- 
generate heart in America to learn that he was 
not entirely without feminine companionship at 
a time when the horror of his life was only par- 
tially mitigated by the preference of his mad and 
wretched wife for the dens and slums of the New 
Cut. This woman of the upper classes had come 
to him like a star, and had been a lamp in his 
darkness. I wonder if she still retains within 
her heart some memories of those hours. 

I have not been able to discover whether it is 
true, as has been said, that some of Maitland's 
ancestors were originally German. He himself 
thought this was so, without having anything 
definite that I remember to go upon. If it were 
true I wonder whether it was his Teutonic an- 
cestry which made him turn with a certain joy 
to the German ideal of woman, that of the haus- 
frau. If little or nothing were known about 
him, or only so much as those know who have 
already written of him, it might, in some ways, 
be possible to reconstruct him by a process of 
deductive analysis, by what the school logicians 
call the regressus a principiatis ad principia. 
This is always a fascinating mental exercise, and 
indeed I think, with a very little light on Mait- 
land's life, it should not have been difficult for 
some to build up a picture not unlike the man. 
For instance, no one with a gleam of intelligence. 



140 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

whether a critic or not, could read some portions 11 
of the chapter in ^'Victorian Novelists" on 
''Women and Dickens" without coming to the 
inevitable conclusion that Maitland's fortune 
with regard to the women with whom he had 
been thrown in contact must have been most la- 
mentably unfortunate. Although Dickens drew 
certain offensive women with almost unequalled 
power, he treats them so that one becomes oblivi- 
ous of their very offensiveness, as Maitland points 
out. Maitland's own commentary on such 
women is ten thousand times more bitter, and it 
is felt, not observed, as in Dickens' books. He 
calls them ''these remarkable creatures," and de- 
clares they belong mostly to one rank of life, the 
lower middle class. "In general their circum- 
stances are comfortable .... nothing is asked 
of them but a quiet and amiable discharge of 
their household duties; they are treated by their 
male kindred with great, often with extraordi- 
nary consideration. Yet their characteristic is 
acidity of temper and boundless licence of quer- 
ulous or insulting talk. The real business of 
their lives is to make all about them as uncom- 
fortable as they can. Invariably, they are unin- 
telligent and untaught; very often they are 
fragrantly imbecile. Their very virtues (if 
such persons can be said to have any) become a 
scourge. In the highways and byways of life, 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 141 

by the fireside, and in the bed-chamber, their 
voices shrill upon the terrified ear." He adds 
that no historical investigation is needed to 
ascertain the truthfulness of these presentments. 
Indeed Maitland required no historical investi- 
gation, he had his personal experience to go 
upon ; but this, indeed, is obvious. Nevertheless 
one cannot help feeling in reading this appalling 
indictment, that something might be said upon 
the other side, and that Maitland's attitude was 
so essentially male as to vitiate many of his con- 
clusions. 

A few pages further on in this book he says: 
"Another man, obtaining his release from these 
depths, would have turned away in loathing; 
Dickens found therein matter for his mirth, 
material for his art." But Maitland knew that 
Dickens had not suffered in the way he himself 
had done. Thus it was that he rejoiced in the 
punishment which Mrs. Joe Gargery received. 
Maitland writes: "Mrs. Joe Gargery shall be 
brought to quietness ; but how? By a half-mur- 
derous blow on the back of her head, from which 
she will never recover. Dickens understood 
by this time that there is no other efficacious way 
with these ornaments of their sex." 

Having spoken of Dickens it may be as well to 
dispose of him, with regard to Maitland, in this 
particular chapter. It seems to be commonly 



142 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

thought that Maitland wrote his book about the 
Victorian novelists not only with the sympathy 
which he expressed, but with considerable joy in 
the actual work. This is not true, for he re- 
garded it essentially as a pot-boiler, and did it 
purely for the money. By some strange kink in 
his mind he chose to do it in Italy, far from any 
reference library. He wrote: ^^My little nov- 
elist book has to be written before Christmas, and 
to do this I must get settled at the earliest pos- 
sible date in a quiet north Italian town. I think 
I shall choose Siena." On what principle he 
decided to choose a quiet north Italian town to 
write a book about Victorian novelists I have 
never been able to determine. It was certainly 
a very curious proceeding, especially as he had 
no overwhelming love of North Italy, which was 
for him the Italy of the Renaissance. As I have 
said, he actually disliked the work, and had no 
desire to do it, well as it was done. It is, how- 
ever, curious, to me, in considering this book, 
to find that neither he nor any other critic of 
Dickens that I have ever read seems to give a 
satisfactory explanation of the great, and at times 
overwhelming, attraction that Dickens has for 
many. And yet on more than one occasion I 
discussed Dickens with him, and in a great meas- 
ure he agreed with a theory I put forth with 
some confidence. I think it still worth consider- 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 143 

ing. For me the great charm of Dickens lies 
not wholly in his humour or even greatly in his 
humour. It is not found in his characterisation, 
nor in his underlying philosophy of revolt, al- 
though almost every writer of consequence is a 
revolutionist. It results purely and simply 
from what the critics of the allied art of painting 
describe as "quality." This is a word exceed- 
ingly difficult to define. It implies more or less 
the characteristic way in which paint is put upon 
the canvas. A picture may be practically worth- 
less from the point of view of subject or compo- 
sition, it may even be comparatively poor in col- 
ouring, and yet it may have an extreme interest 
of surface. One finds, I think, the same thing 
in Dickens' writings. His page is full. It is 
fuller than the page of any other English writer. 
There are, so to speak, on any given page by any 
man a certain number of intellectual and emo- 
tional stimuli. Dickens' page is full of these 
stimuli to a most extreme degree. It is like a 
small mosaic, and yet clear. It has cross mean- 
ings, cross lights, reflections, suggestions. Com- 
pare a page of Dickens with a page, say, of 
Thackeray. Take a pencil and write down the 
number of mental suggestions given by a sen- 
tence of Thackeray. Take, again, a sentence of 
Dickens, and see how many more there are to be 
found. It is this tremendous and overflowing 



144 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

fulness which really constitutes Dickens' great 
and peculiar power. 

But all this is anticipation. Not yet was he to 
write of Dickens, Thackeray, and the Brontes, 
for much was to befall him before he went to 
Italy again. He was once more alone, and I 
think I knew that this loneliness would not last 
for long. I have often regretted that I did not 
foresee what I might have foreseen if I had con- 
sidered the man and his circumstances with the 
same fulness which comes to one in later years 
after Fate has wrought itself out. Had I known 
all that I might have known, or done all that I 
might have done, I could perhaps have saved 
him from something even worse than his first 
marriage. Yet, after all, I was a poor and busy 
man, and while living in Chelsea had many com- 
panions, some of them men who have now made 
a great name in the world of Art. The very na- 
ture of Maitland and his work, the dreadful con- 
centration he required to do something which 
was, as I insist again, alien from his true nature, 
forbade my seeing him very often, or even often 
enough to gather from his reticence what was 
really in his mind. Had I gone to see him with- 
out any warning, it would, I knew, have utterly 
destroyed his whole day's work. But this soli- 
tude, this enforced and appalling loneliness, 
which seemed to him necessary for work if he 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 145 

was to live, ate into him deeply. It destroyed 
his nerve and what judgment he ever had which, 
heaven knows, was little enough. What it means 
to some men to live in such solitude only those \ 
who know can tell, and they never tell. To 
Maitland, with his sensual and sensuous nature, 
it was most utter damnation. 

By now he had come out of the pit of his first 
marriage, and gradually the horrors he had 
passed through became dim to his eyes. They 
were like a badly toned photograph, and faded. 
I did foresee that something would happen 
sooner or later to alter the way in which he lived, 
but I know I did not foresee, and could not have 
foreseen or imagined what was actually coming, 
for no one could have prophesied it. It was ab- 
surd, impossible, monstrous, and almost bathos. 
And yet it fits in with the character of the man as 
it had been distorted by circumstance. One Sun* 
day when I visited him he told me, with a strange 
mixture of abruptness and hesitation, that he had 
made the acquaintance of a girl in the Maryle- 
bone road. Naturally enough I thought at first 
that his resolution and his habits had broken 
down and that he had picked up some prostitute 
of the neighbourhood. But it turned out that 
the girl was ^'respectable." He said to me: "I 
could stand it no longer, so I rushed out and 
spoke to the very first woman I came across." 



146 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

It was an unhappy inspiration of the desperate, 
and was the first act of a prolonged drama of pain 
and misery. It took me some time and many 
questions to find out what this meant, and what 
it was to lead to, but presently he replied sullenly 
that he proposed to marry the girl if she would 
marry him. On hearing this, I fell into silence 
and we sat for a long time without speaking. 
Knowing him as I did, it was yet a great shock 
to me. For I would rather have seen him in the 
physical clutches of the biggest harpy in the 
Strand — knowing that such now could not long 
hold him. I had done my best, as a mere boy, 
to prevent him marrying his first wife, and had 
failed with the most disastrous results. I now 
determined to stop this marriage if I could. I 
ventured to remind him of the past, and the part 
I had played in it when I implored him to have 
no more to do with Marian Hilton long before 
he married her. I told him once more, trying 
to renew it in him, of the relief it had been when 
his first wife died, but nothing that I could say 
seemed to move, or even to offend him. His 
mind recognised the truth of everything, but his 
body meant to have its way. He was quiet, sul- 
len, set — even when I told him that he would re- 
pent it most bitterly. The only thing I could 
at last get him to agree to w^s that he would take 
no irrevocable step for a week. 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 14T 

I asked him questions about the girl. He 
admitted that he did not love her in any sense of 
the word love. He admitted that she had no 
great powers of attraction, that she seemed to 
possess no particularly obvious intellect. She 
had received his advances in the street in the way 
that such girls, whose courtship is traditionally 
carried on in the open thoroughfare, do receive 
them. But when he asked her to visit him in his 
chambers she replied to that invitation with all 
the obvious suspicion of a lower-class girl from 
whom no sex secrets were hidden. From the 
very start the whole affair seemed hopeless, pre- 
posterous, intolerable, and I went away from him 
in despair. It was a strange thing that Maitland 
did not seem to know what love was. If I have 
not before this said something about his essential 
lack of real passion in his dealings with women 
it must be said now. Of course, it is quite obvi- 
ous that he had a boyish kind of passion for 
Marian Hilton, but it was certainly not that kind 
of passion which mostly keeps boys innocent. 
Indeed those calf loves which afflict youths are 
at the same time a great help to them, for a boy 
is really as naturally coy as any maiden. If by 
any chance Maitland, instead of coming into 
the hands of a poor girl of the streets of Moor- 
hampton, had fallen in love with some young 
girl of decent character and upbringing, his 



148 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

passions would not have been so fatally roused. 
I think it was probably the whole root of his 
disaster that this should have occurred at all. 
Possibly it was the horror and rage and anger 
connected with this first affair, combined with 
the fact that it became actually sensual, which 
prevented him having afterwards what one might 
without priggishness describe as a pure passion. 
At any rate I never saw any signs of his being 
capable of the overwhelming passion which 
might under other circumstances drive a man 
down to hell, or raise him to heaven. To my 
mind all his books betray an extreme lack of this. 
His characters in all their love-affairs are essen- 
tially too reasonable. A man wishes to marry a 
girl, not because he desires her simply and over- 
whelmingly, but because she is a fitting person, 
or the kind of woman of whom he has been able 
to build up certain ideas which suit his mind. 
In fact the love of George Hardy for Isabel in 
"The Exile" is somewhat typical of the whole 
attitude he had towards affairs of passion. Then 
again in "Paternoster Row" there is the suicide 
of Gifford which throws a very curious light on 
Maitland's nature. Apparently Gifford did not 
commit suicide because of his failure, or because 
he was half starving, it was because he was 
weakly desirous of a woman like Anne — not nec- 
essarily Anne herself. In Maitland's phrase, he 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 149 

desired her to complete his manhood, to my mind 
the most ridiculous way of putting the affair. 
It is in this, I think, that Maitland showed his 
essential lack of knowledge of the other sex. A 
man does not captivate women by going to them 
and explaining, with more or less periphrasis, 
that they are required to complete his manhood, 
that he feels a rather frustrate male individual 
without them. And if he has these ideas at the 
back of his head and goes courting, the result is 
hardly likely to be successful. Maitland never 
understood the passion in the man that sweeps a 
woman off her feet. One finds this lack in all 
his men who live celibate lives. They suffer 
physically, or they suffer to a certain degree from 
loneliness, but one never feels that only one 
woman could cure their pain, or alleviate their 
desolation. At times Maitland seemed, as it : 
were, to be in love with the sex but not with the \ 
woman. Of course he had a bitter hatred of \ 
the general prejudices of morality, a thing which 
was only natural to any one who had lived his 
life and thought what he thought. It is a curi- 
ous thing to note that his favourite poem in the 
whole English language was perhaps the least 
likely one that could be picked out. This was 
Browning's ^'Statue and the Bust," which is cer- 
tainly of a teaching not Puritan in its essence. 
The Puritan ideal Maitland loathed with a fer- 



150 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

vour which produced the nearest I have ever seen 
in him to actual rage and madness. He roared 
against it if he did not scoff. He sometimes 
quoted the well-known lines from the unknown 
Brathwait: 

"Where I saw a Puritane ane 
Hanging of his Cat on Monday, 
For killing of a Mouse on Sonday." 

I remember very well his taking down Browning 
when I was with him one afternoon at 7 K. He 
read a great portion of "The Statue and the 
Bust" out aloud, and we discussed it afterwards, 
of course pointing out to each other with em- 
phasis its actual teaching, its loathing of futility. 
It teaches that the two people who loved each 
other but never achieved love were two weak- 
lings, who ought to have acted, and should not 
have allowed themselves to be conquered by the 
lordly husband. Maitland said: ^'Those peo- 
ple who buy Browning and think they under- 
stand it — oh, if they really knew what he meant 
they would pick him up with a pair of tongs, 
and take him out, and burn him in their back 
yards — in their back yards!" It strikes one that 
Maitland, in his haste, seemed to imagine that 
the kind of bourgeois or bourgeoise whom he im- 
agined thus destroying poor Browning with the 
aid of tongs, possessed such thinigs as back yards. 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 151 

and, perhaps, frequented them on Sunday after- 
noons. But he had lived for so many years in 
houses which had not a garden, or anything but 
a small, damp yard behind, that he began to 
think, possibly, that all houses were alike. I 
roared with laughter at his notion of what these 
prosperous Puritans would do. I had a picture 
in my mind of some well-dressed woman of the 
upper middle-class bringing out ^The Statue 
and the Bust" with a pair of tongs, and burning 
it in some small and horrible back yard belong- 
ing to a house in the slums between Tottenham 
Court Road and Fitzroy Square. And yet, al- 
though he understood Browning's sermon against 
the passive futility of these weak and unfortunate 
lovers he could not, I think, have understood 
wholly, or in anything but a literary sense the 
enormous power of passion which Browning 
possessed. This lack in him is one of the keys 
to his character, and it unlocks much. When I 
left him after he told me about this new affair, 
I went back to my own rooms and sat thinking 
it over, wondering if it were possible even now to- 
do anything to save him from his own nature, 
and the catastrophe his nature was preparing. 
Without having seen the girl I felt sure that it 
would be a catastrophe, for I knew him too well. 
Nevertheless on reflecting over the matter it did 
seem to me that there was one possible chance of 



152 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

saving him from himself. It was a very unlikely 
thing that I should succeed, but at any rate I 
could try. 

I have said that we rarely spoke of his early 
life, and never of what had happened in Moor- 
hampton. Nevertheless I was, of course, aware 
that it dominated the whole of his outlook and 
all of his thoughts in any way connected with 
ordinary social life, especially with regard to in- 
tercourse with those who might know something 
about his early career. At this time I do not 
think that he actually blamed himself much for 
what had happened. Men die many times in 
life and are born again, and by this time he must 
have looked on the errant youth who had been 
himself as little more than an ancestor. He him- 
self had died and risen again, and if he was not 
the man he might have been, he was certainly 
not the man he had been. Nevertheless he was 
perpetually alive to what other people might 
possibly think of him. I believe that the real 
reason for his almost rigid seclusion from so- 
ciety was that very natural fear that some brute, 
and he knew only too well that there are such 
brutes, might suddenly and unexpectedly expose 
his ancient history. It is true that even in our 
society in England, which is not famous all the 
world over for tact, it was not very likely to 
happen. Nevertheless the bare possibility that 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 153 

it might occur absolutely dominated him. It 
requires very little sympathy or understanding 
of his character to see that this must have been 
so. No doubt it was mainly from this cause that 
he considered he had no right to approach 
women of his own class, seeing that he had de- 
classed himself, without telling the whole truth. 
But this was quite impossible for him to do, and 
I knew it. In some cases it would have been 
wise, in some unwise, but Henry Maitland was 
unable to do such a thing. The result was this 
sudden revolt, and the madness which led him 
to speak to this girl of the Marylebone Road, 
whom I had not yet met but whom I pictured, 
not inadequately, in my mind. At the first 
glance it seemed that nothing could possibly be 
done, that the man must be left to ^'dree his 
weird," to work out his fate and accomplish his 
destiny. And yet I lay awake for a very long 
time that night thinking of the whole situation, 
and I at last determined to take a step on his be- 
half which, at any rate, had the merit of some 
originality and courage. 

Years ago in Moorhampton, when he was a 
boy, before the great disaster came, Maitland 
had visited my uncle's house, and had obviously 
pleased every one he met there. He was bright, 
not bad looking, very cheerful and enthusiastic, 
and few that met him did not like him. Among 



154 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

those whose acquaintance he made at that house 
were two of my own cousins. In later years 
they often spoke of him to me, even although 
they had not seen him since he was a boy of 
seventeen. I now went to both of them and told 
them the whole affair in confidence, speaking 
quite openly of his character, and the impossi- 
bility he discovered within himself of living in 
the desolation which fate had brought upon him. 
They understood his character, and were ac- 
quainted with his reputation. He was a man of 
genius, if not a man of great genius, and occupied 
a certain position in literature which would one 
day, we all felt assured, be still a greater position. 
They were obviously exceedingly sorry for him, 
and not the less sorry when I told them of the 
straits in which he sometimes found himself. 
Nevertheless it seemed to me, as I explained to 
them, that if he had been lucky enough to marry 
some one in sympathy with him and his work, 
some one able to help in a little way to push him 
forward on the lines on which he might have 
attained success, there was yet great hope for him 
even in finance, or so I believed. Then I asked 
them whether it would not be possible to stop 
this proposed outrageous marriage, a thing 
which seemed to me utterly unnatural. They 
were, however, unable to make any suggestion, 
and certainly did not follow what was in my 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 155 

mind. Then I opened what I had to say, and 
asked them abruptly if it were not possible for 
one of them to consider whether she would 
marry him if the present affair could be brought 
decently to an end. They were both educated 
women, and knew at least two foreign languages. 
They were accustomed to books, and appreciated 
his work. 

No doubt my proposal sounded absurd, un- 
conventional, and perhaps not a little horrifying. 
Nevertheless when I have had anything to do in 
life I have not been accustomed to let convention 
stand in my way. Such marriages have been ar- 
ranged and have not been unsuccessful. There 
was, I thought, a real possibility of such a mar- 
riage as I proposed being anything but a failure. 
Our conversation ended at last in both of them 
undertaking to consider the matter if, after meet- 
ing Maitland again, they still remained of the 
same mind, and if he found that such a step was 
possible. I have often wondered since whether 
any situation exactly like this ever occurred be- 
fore. I own that I found it somewhat interest- 
ing, and when at last I went back to Maitland I 
felt entitled to tell him that he could do much 
better than marrying an unknown girl of the 
lower classes whom he had accosted in the streets 
in desperation. But he received what I had to 
say in a very curious manner. It seemed to de- 



156 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

press him profoundly. Naturally enough, I did 
not tell him the names of those who were pre- 
pared to make his acquaintance, but I did 
tell him that I had been to a lady who had once 
met him and greatly admired his work, who 
would be ready to consider the possibility of her 
becoming his wife if on meeting once again they 
proved sympathetic. He shook his head grimly, 
and, after a long silence, he told me that he had 
not kept his word, and that he had asked Ada 
Brent to marry him. He had, he said, gone too 
far to withdraw. 

There is such a thing in life as the tyranny of 
honour, and personally I cared very little for this 
point of honour when I thought of his future. 
It was not as if this girl's affections were in any 
way engaged. If they had been I would have 
kept silence, bitterly as I regretted the whole af- 
fair. She was curious about him, and that was 
all. It would do her no harm to lose him, and, 
indeed, as the event proved, it would have been 
better if she had not married at all. Therefore 
I begged him to shut up the flat and leave Lon- 
don at once. I even offered to try and find the 
money for him to do so. But, like all weak peo- 
ple, he was peculiarly obstinate, and nothing that 
I could urge had the least effect upon him. I 
have often thought it was his one great failure 
in rectitude which occurred at Moorhampton 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 157 

that made him infinitely more tenacious of doing 
nothing which might seem in any way dishon- 
ourable, however remotely. I did not succeed 
in moving him, with whatever arguments I plied 
him, and the only satisfaction I got out of it was 
the sense that he knew I was most deeply inter- 
ested in him, and had done everything, even 
much more than might have been expected, to 
save him from what I thought must lead to ir- 
reparable misery. Certainly the whole incident 
was remarkable. There was, perhaps, a little 
air of curiously polite comedy about it, and yet 
it was the prelude to a tragedy. 

It was soon after this, in fact it was on the 
following Sunday, that I made the acquaintance 
of the young woman who was to be his second 
wife, to bear his children, to torture him for 
years, to drive him almost mad, and once more 
make a financial slave of him. We three met in 
the gloomy sitting-room at 7 K. My first im- 
pression of this girl was more unfavourable than 
I had expected. She was the daughter of a 
small tradesman but little removed from an arti- 
san, and she looked it. In the marriage certifi- 
cate her father is described as a carver, for what 
reason I am unable to determine, for I have a 
very distinct recollection that Maitland told me 
he was a bootmaker, probably even a cobbler. 
I disliked the young woman at first sight, and 



158 HENRY MAITLAND 

never got over my early impression. From the 
very beginning it seemed impossible that she 
could ever become in any remote degree v^hat he 
might justifiably have asked for in a v^ife. Yet 
she was not wholly disagreeable in appear- 
ance. She was of medium height and somewhat 
dark. She had not, however, the least pretence 
to such beauty as one might hope to find even in 
a slave of the kitchen. She possessed neither 
face nor figure, nor a sweet voice, nor any charm 
— she was just a female. And this was she that 
the most fastidious man in many ways, that I 
knew, was about to marry. I went away with a 
sick heart, for it was nothing less than a frightful 
catastrophe, and I had to stand by and see it hap- 
pen. He married her on March 20, 1891, and 
went to live near Exeter. 



CHAPTER VII 

FOR many months after he left London I 
did not see Maitland, although we con- 
tinued to correspond, somewhat irregu- 
larly. He was exceedingly reticent as to the 
results of his marriage, and I did not discover 
definitely for some time to what extent it was 
likely to prove a failure. Indeed, I had many 
things to do, and was both financially and in 
other matters in a parlous condition. In some 
ways it was a relief to me that he should be liv- 
ing in the country, as I always felt, rightly or 
wrongly, a certain feeling of responsibility with 
regard to him when he was close at hand. Mar- 
riage always takes one's friends away from one, 
and for a time he was taken from me. But as I 
am not anxious to write in great detail about the 
more sordid facts of his life, especially when 
they do not throw light on his character, I am 
not disturbed at knowing little of the earlier days 
of his second marriage. The results are suffi- 
cient, and they will presently appear. For 
Maitland remained Maitland, and his character 
did not alter now. So I may return for a little 

159 



160 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

while to matters more connected with his literary 
life. 

I have, I think, before this endeavoured to 
describe or suggest his personal appearance, but 
whenever I think of him I regret deeply that no 
painter ever made an adequate portrait of the 
man. He was especially interesting-looking, 
and most obviously lovable and sympathetic 
when any of his feelings were roused. His grey 
eyes were very bright and intelligent, his fea- 
tures finely cut, and at times he was almost beau- 
tiful; although his skin was not always in such 
a good condition as it should have been, and he 
was always very badly freckled. For those who 
have never seen him a photograph published in 
a dull literary journal, which is now defunct, is 
certainly the most adequate and satisfying pre- 
sentment of him in existence. On a close in- 

• 

spection of this photograph it will be observed 
that he brushed his hair straight backward from 
his forehead without any parting. He had a 
curious way of dressing his hair, about which he 
was very particular. It was very fine hair of a 
brown colour, perhaps of a rather mousy tint, 
and it was never cut except at the ends at the 
nape of his neck. Whenever he washed his face 
he used to fasten this hair back with an elastic 
band which he always carried in his waistcoat 
pocket. On some occasions, when I have stayed 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 161 

the night at 7 K and seen him at his toilette, this 
elastic band gave him a very odd appearance, 
almost as if he wore, for the time being, a very 
odd halo; but as his hair was so long in front it 
would otherwise have fallen into the basin of 
water. He told me that once in Germany a 
waiter entered the room while he was washing 
his face, and on perceiving this peculiar head- 
dress betrayed signs of mixed amusement and 
alarm. As Maitland said, "I believe he thought 
I was mad." 

His forehead was high, his head exceedingly 
well shaped but not remarkably large. He al- 
ways wore a moustache. Considering his very 
sedentary life his natural physique was extremely 
good, and he was capable of walking great dis- 
tances if he were put to it and was in condition. 
Seen nude, he had the figure of a possible athlete. 
I used to tell him that he might be an exceedingly 
strong man if he cared to take the trouble to be- 
come one, but his belief, which is to be found 
expressed in one passage of 'The Meditations," 
was that no one in our times could be at once in- 
tellectually and physically at his best. Indeed, 
he had in a way a peculiar contempt for mere 
strength, and I do not doubt that much of his 
later bodily weakness and illness might have been 
avoided if he had thought more of exercise and 
open air. 



162 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

In no way was he excessive, in spite of his 
jocular pretence of a monstrous addiction to 
^'strong waters" as he always called them. He 
did love wine, as I have written, but he loved it 
with discretion, although not with real knowl- 
edge. It was a case of passion and faith with 
him. I could imagine that in some previous in- 
carnation — were there such things as reincarna- 
tions — he must have been an Italian writer of the 
South he loved so well. A little while ago I 
spoke of the strange absence of colour in his 
rooms. On rereading "The Meditations," I find 
some kind of an explanation, or what he con- 
sidered an explanation, of this fact, to which I 
myself drew his attention. He seemed to imag- 
ine that his early acquaintance with his father's 
engravings inspired him with a peculiar love of 
black and white. More probably the actual 
truth is that his father's possible love of colour 
had never been developed any more than his 
son's. 

His fantastic attempts at times to make one 
believe that he was a great drinker, when a bottle 
of poor and common wine served him and me for 
a dinner and made us joyous, were no more true 
than that he was a great smoker. He had a 
prodigious big pot of tobacco in his rooms in the 
early days, a pot containing some form of mild 
returns which to my barbaric taste suggested 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 163 

nothing so much as hay that had been stored next 
some mild tobacco. It was one of my grievances 
against him that when I visited his rooms hard 
up for tobacco, a thing which frequently oc- 
curred in those days, I was almost unable to use 
his. But it was always a form of joke with him 
to pretend that his habits were monstrously ex- 
cessive. As I have said, one of his commonest 
forms of humour was exaggeration. Many peo- 
ple misunderstood that his very expressions of 
despair were all touched with a grim humour. 
Nevertheless he and his rooms were grim 
enough. On his shelves there was a French 
book, the title of which I forget, dealing with- 
out any reticence with the lives of the band of 
young French writers under the Second Empire, 
who perished miserably in the conditions to 
which they were exposed. This book is a series 
of short and bitter biographies, ending for the 
most part with, "mourut a I'hopital," or "brulait 
la cervelle." We were by no means for ever 
cheerful in these times. 

I do not think I have said very much, except 
by bitter implication, of his financial position, or 
what he earned. But his finances were a part of 
his general life's tragedy. There is a passage 
somewhere at the end of a chapter in '^In the 
Morning" which says: ^Tut money in thy 
purse ; and again, put money in thy purse ; for, 



164 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

as the world is ordered, to lack current coin is to 
lack the privileges of humanity, and indigence is 
the death of the soul." I have been speaking 
wholly in vain if it is not understood that he was 
a man extremely difficult to influence, even for 
his own good. This was because he was weak, 
and his weakness came out with most exceeding 
force in all his dealings with publishers and edit- 
ors. For the most part he was atrociously paid, 
but the fact remains that he was paid, and his 
perpetual fear was that his books would presently 
be refused, and that he would get no one to take 
them if he remonstrated with those who were his 
taskmasters. In such an event he gloomily an- 
ticipated, not so much the workhouse, but once 
more a cellar off the Tottenham Court Road, or 
some low, poverty-stricken post as a private tutor 
or the usher of a poor school. Sometimes when 
we were together he used to talk with a certain 
pathetic jocosity, or even jealousy, of Coleridge's 
luck in having discovered his amiable patron, 
Gillman. He did not imagine that nowadays 
any Gillmans were to be found, nor do I think 
that any Gillman would have found Maitland 
possible. One night after we had been talking 
about Coleridge and Gillman he sat down and 
wrote a set of poor enough verses, which are not 
without humour, and certainly highly character- 
istic, that ran as follows : 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 165 

THE HUMBLE ASPIRATION OF H.M., 
NOVELIST 

" Hoc erat in votis." 

Oh could I encounter a Glllman, 

Who would board me and lodge me for aye, 

With what intellectual skill, man, 
My life should be frittered away! 

What visions of study methodic 

My leisurely hours would beguile! — 

I would potter with details prosodic, 
I would ponder perfections of style. 

I would joke in a vein pessimistic 

At all the disasters of earth ; 
I would trifle with schemes socialistic, 

And turn over matters for mirth. 

From the quiddities quaint of Quintilian 

I would flit to the latest critiques ; — 
I would visit the London Pavilion, 

And magnify lion-comiques. 

With the grim ghastly gaze of a Gorgon 

I would cut Hendersonian bores — 
I would follow the ambulant organ 

That jingles at publicans' doors. 

In the odorous alleys of Wapping 
I would saunter on evenings serene ; 



166 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

When the dews of the Sabbath were dropping 
You would find me on Clerkenwell Green. 

At the Hall Scientific of Bradlaugh 

I would revel in atheist rant, 
Or enjoy an attack on some bad law 

By the notable Mrs. Besant, 

I would never omit an oration 

Of Cunninghame Graham or Burns; 

And the Army miscalled of Salvation 
Should furnish me frolic by turns. 

Perchance I would muse o'er a mystic; 

Perchance I would booze at a bar; 
And when in the mind journalistic 

I would read the 'Tall Mall" and the "Star." 

Never more would I toil with my quill, man, 
Or plead for the publishers' pay. — 

Oh where and O where is the Gillman, 
Who will lodge me and board me for aye? 

Now as to his actual earnings. His first book 
"Children of the Dawn," was published by Ham- 
erton's. So far as I am aware it brought him in 
nothing. The book, naturally enough, was a 
dead failure; nobody perceived its promise, and 
it never sold. I do not think he received a penny 
on account for it. He got little more for "Out- 
side the Pale," which was published in 1884, the 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 167 

year I went to America, and was dedicated to me, 
as the initials J. C. H. on the dedication page of 
the first edition testify. At that time I still re- 
tained in signature my second initial. This 
book was published by Andrews and Company, 
and it was through it that he first made acquaint- 
ance in a business way with George Meredith, 
then quite a poor man, and working for the firm 
as a reader just before he went to Chapman and 
Hall. 

In "Outside the Pale," as a manuscript there 
was a chapter, or part of a chapter, of a curi- 
ously romantic kind. It was some such theme 
as that which I myself treated in a romantic 
story called 'The Purification." Hilda Moon, 
the idealised heroine of the streets, washed her- 
self pure of her sins in the sea at midnight, if I 
remember the incident rightly, for I never ac- 
tually read it. It appears that George Meredith 
was much taken with the book, but found his 
sense of fitness outraged by the introduction of 
this highly romantic incident. It seemed out of 
tone with the remainder of the book and the way 
in which it was written. He begged Maitland 
to eliminate it. Now as a rule Maitland, being 
a young writer, naturally objected to altering 
anything, but he knew that Meredith was right. 
At any rate, even at that period, the older man 
had had such an enormous experience that Mait- 



168 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

land accepted his opinion and acted upon it. 
He told me that George Meredith came down- 
stairs with him into the street, and standing on 
the doorstep once more reiterated his advice as 
to this particular passage. He said in the pe- 
culiar way so characteristic of him, "My dear 
sir, I beg you to believe, it made me shiverT 
That passage is missing in the published book. 
"Outside the Pale" had a kind of succes 
d'estime. Certain people read it, and certain 
people liked it. It was something almost fresh 
in English. Nevertheless he made little or noth- 
ing out of it. Few, indeed, were those who made 
money out of Andrews and Company at that 
time. The business was run by Harry Andrews, 
known in the trade as "the liar," a man who 
notoriously never spoke the truth if a lie would 
bring him in a penny. I afterwards published 
a book with the same firm, and had to deal with 
the same man. After "Outside the Pale" came 
"Isabel," which, as I have said, was obviously 
written under the influence of Tourgeniev. So 
far as I am aware this influence has not been 
noted, even by so acute a critic as Thomas Sack- 
ville, but I myself was at that time a great reader 
of Tourgeniev, partly owing to Maitland's rec- 
ommendation and insistence upon the man, and 
I recognised his influence at once. Maitland 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 169 

openly acknowledged it, a thing no writer does 
without very strong reason. This book, of 
course, was not a success. That, I believe, was 
the last work he published with Andrews and 
Company. So far as he was concerned the firm 
had not been a success. He was still compelled 
to earn his bread and cheese and rent by teaching.* 
Although Tourgeniev was the earliest great' 
influence upon Maitland, his influence was very 
largely that of form. So far as feeling was con- 
cerned his god for many years was undoubtedly 
Dostoievsky. That Russian writer himself suf- 
fered and had been down into the depths like the 
modern writer Gorki, which was what appealed 
to Maitland. Indeed he says somewhere: 
^^Dostoievsky, a poor and suffering man, gives 
us with immense power his own view of penury 
and wretchedness." It was Maitland who first 
introduced ^'Crime and Punishment," to me. 
There is no doubt, when one comes to think of it 
seriously, a certain likeness between the modern 
Russian school and Maitland's work, and that 
likeness is perhaps founded on something deeper 
than mere community of subject which shows 
itself here and there. Perhaps there is some- 
thing essentially Slav-like in Maitland's attitude 
to life. He was a dreamer, rebellious and un- 
able. If, indeed, his ancestry was partly Teu- 



170 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

tonic, he might have been originally as much 
Slav as German. 

In 1886, while I was still in America, he began 
*The Mob." At that time, just when he had 
almost done the first two volumes, there occurred 
the Trafalgar Square Riots, in which John 
Burns, Hyndman, and Henry Hyde Champion, 
were concerned. Fool as Maitland was about 
his own affairs, he yet saw that it was a wonder- 
ful coincidence from his point of view that he 
should have been dealing with labour matters 
and the nature of the mob at this juncture. 
Some rare inspiration or suggestion led him to 
rush down with the first two volumes to Messrs. 
Miller and Company, where they were seen by 
John Glass, who said to him, ''Give us the rest 
at once and we will begin printing it now." He 
went home and wrote the third volume in a fort- 
night while the other two volumes were in the 
press. This book was published anonymously, 
as it was thought, naturally enough, that this 
would give it a greater chance of success. It 
might reasonably be attributed to any one, and 
Maitland's name at that time, or indeed at any 
time afterwards, was very little help towards 
financial success. Now I am of opinion, speak- 
ing from memory, that this book was bought 
out and out by the publishing firm for fifty 
pounds. To a young writer who had never 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 171 

made so much fifty pounds was a large sum. In 
Maitland's exaggerated parlance it was "gross 
and riotous wealth." 

Having succeeded in getting hold of a good 
firm of notable and well-known publishers, he 
dreaded leaving them, even though he very soon 
discovered that fifty pounds for a long three- 
volume novel was most miserable pay. That he 
wrote books rapidly at times was no guarantee 
that he would always write them as rapidly. 
For once in his life he had written a whole vol- 
ume in a fortnight, but it might just as well take 
him many months. There are, indeed, very few 
of his books of which most of the first volume 
was not destroyed, rewritten, and sometimes de- 
stroyed and again rewritten. Nevertheless he 
discovered a tremendous reluctance to ask for 
better terms. It was not only his fear of return- 
ing to the old irremediable poverty which made 
him dread leaving a firm who were not all they 
might have been, but he was cursed with a most 
unnecessary tenderness for them. He actually 
dreaded hurting the feelings of a publishing firm 
which had naturally all the qualities and defects 
of a corporation. The reason that he did at last 
leave this particular firm was rather curious. It 
shows that what many might think a mere coin- 
cidence may prejudice a fair man's mind. 

As I have said, he had been in the habit of 



172 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

selling his books outright for fifty pounds. 
After this had gone on for many books I sug- 
gested to him, as everything he wrote went into 
several editions under the skilful management 
of the firm, that it might be as well to sell them 
the first edition only and ask for a royalty on the 
succeeding ones. Now this would never have 
occurred to him, and he owned that it was a good 
idea. So when ^'The Flower," was finished he 
sold the first edition for forty pounds, and ar- 
ranged for a percentage on succeeding editions. 
He went on with the next book at once. Now 
as it happened, curiously enough, there was no 
second edition of 'The Flower" called for, and 
this so disheartened poor Maitland that he sold 
his two next novels outright for the usual sum. 
One day when I was with him he spoke of the 
bad luck of "The Flower," which seemed to him 
almost inexplicable. It was so very unlucky 
that it had not done well, for the loss of the extra 
ten pounds was not easy for him to get over in 
his perpetual and grinding poverty. When we 
had discussed the matter he determined to ask 
the firm what they would give him for all further 
rights in the book. He did. this, and they were 
kind enough to pay the sum of ten pounds for 
them, making up the old price of fifty pounds 
for the whole book. Then, by one of those 
chances which only business men are capable of 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 173 

thoroughly appreciating, a demand suddenly 
sprang up for the story and the publishers were 
enabled to bring out a new edition at once. 
Some time later it went into a third edition, and, 
I believe, even into a fourth. Now it will hardly 
be credited that Maitland was very sore about 
this, for he was usually a very just man ; and when 
I suggested, for the hundredth time but now at 
the psychological moment, that the firm of Bent 
and Butler who were then publishing for me, 
might give him very good terms, he actually had 
the courage to leave his own publishers, and 
never went back to them. 

I have insisted time and again upon Mait- 
land's weakness and his inability to move. 
Nothing, I believe, but a sense of rankling in- 
justice would have made him move. I had been 
trying for three years to get him to go to my pub- 
lishing friends, and I have heard his conduct in 
the matter described as obstinacy. But to speak 
truly it was sheer weakness and nervousness. 
The older firm at any rate gave him fifty pounds 
for a book, and they were wealthy people, likely 
to last. My own friends were new men, and al- 
though they gave him a hundred pounds on ac- 
count of increasing royalties, it was conceivably 
possible that they might be a failure and pres- 
ently go out of business. His notion was that 
the firm he had left would then refuse to have 



174 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

anything more to do with him, that he would get 
no other firm to publish his work, and that he 
would be thrown back into the ditch from which 
he had crawled with so much difficulty. It is 
an odd comment on himself where he makes one 
man say to another in 'Taternoster Row" : ^'You 
are the kind of man who is roused by necessity. 
I am overcome by it. My nature is feeble and 
luxurious. I never in my life encountered and 
overcame a practical difficulty." He spoke 
afterwards somewhat too bitterly of his earlier 
publishing experiences, and was never tired of 
quoting Mrs. Gaskell to show how Charlotte 
Bronte had fared. 

In 'The Meditations" he says: 'Think of 
that grey, pinched life, the latter years of which 
would have been so brightened had Charlotte 
Bronte received but, let us say, one-third of what, 
in the same space of time, the publisher gained 
by her books. I know all about this; alas! no 
man better." There was no subject on which 
he was more bitterly vocal. Mr. Jones-Brown, 
the senior partner of Messrs. Miller and Com- 
pany, I knew myself, for after I wrote 'The 
Wake of the Sun," it was read by Glass and sold 
to them for fifty pounds. When this bargain 
was finally struck Mr. Jones-Brown said to me: 
"Now, Mr. H., as the business is all done, would 
you mind telling me quite frankly to what ex- 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 175 

tent this book of yours is true?" I replied: 
"It is as true in every detail as it can possibly 
be." 'Then you mean to say," he asked, ''that 
you actually did starve as you relate?" I said: 
"Certainly I did, and I might have made it a 
deal blacker if I had chosen." He fell into a 
momentary silent reverie and shaking his head, 
murmured: "Ah, hunger is a dreadful thing; 
— I once went without dinner myself!" This 
was a favourite story of Henry Maitland's. It 
was so characteristic of the class he chiefly 
loathed. Those who have gathered by now what 
his satiric and ironic tendencies were, can im- 
agine his bitter, and at the same time uproar- 
iously jocular comments on such a statement. 
For he was the man who had stood cursing out- 
side a cookshop without even a penny to satisfy 
his raging hunger, as he truly relates under cover 
of "The Meditations." 

It is an odd, and perhaps even remarkable 
fact, that the man who had suffered in this way, 
and was so wonderfully conscious of the ab- 
surdities and monstrosities of our present social 
system, working by the pressure of mere eco- 
nomics, should have regarded all kinds of re- 
form not merely without hope, but with an act- 
ual terror. He had once, as he owned, been 
touched by Socialism, probably of a purely 
academic kind; and yet, when he was afterwards 



176 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

withdrawn from such stimuli as had influenced 
him to think for once in terms of sociology, he 
went back to his more natural depairing con- 
servative frame of mind. He lived in the past, 
and was conscious every day that something in 
the past that he loved was dying and must van- 
ish. No form of future civilisation, whatever 
it might be, which was gained by means im- 
plying the destruction of what he chiefly loved, 
could ever appeal to him. He was not even 
able to believe that the gross and partial edu- 
cation of the populace was better than no edu- 
cation at all, in that it must some day inevitably 
lead to better education and a finer type of so- 
ciety. It was for that reason that he was a Con- 
servative. But he was the kind of Conservative 
who would now be repudiated by those who 
call themselves such, except perhaps in some be- 
lated and befogged country house. 

A non-combative Tory seems a contradiction 
in words, but Maitland's loathing of disturbance 
in any form, or of any solution of any question 
by means other than the criticism of the Pure 
Reason, was most extreme. As for his feelings 
towards the Empire and all that it implied, that 
is best put in a few words he wrote to me about 
my novel "In the Sun": "Yes, this is good, but 
you know that I loathe the Empire, and that 
India and Africa are abomination to me." To 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 177 

anticipate as I tell his story I may quote again on 
the same point from a letter written to me in 
later years when he was in Paris: "I am very 
seriously thinking of trying to send my boy to 
some part of the world where there is at least 
a chance of his growing up an honest farmer 
without obvious risk of his having to face the 
slavery of military service. I would greatly 
rather never see him again than foresee his 
marching in ranks ; butchering, or to be butch- 
ered." 

This implies, of course, as I have said before, 
that he failed for ever to grasp the world as it 
was. He clung passionately and with revolt to 
his own ideas of what it ought to be, and pro- 
tested with a curious feeble violence against the 
actual world as he would not see it. It is a 
wonder that he did any work at all. If he had 
had fifty pounds a year of his own he would have 
retreated into a cottage and asphyxiated himself 
with books. 

I have often thought that the most painful 
thing in all his work was what he insisted on so 
often in "Paternoster Row" with regard to the 
poor novelist there depicted. The man was al- 
ways destroying commenced work. Once he 
speaks about "writing a page or two of manu- 
script daily, with several holocausts to retard 
him." Within my certain knowledge this hap- 



178 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

pened scores of times to Maitland. He de- 
stroyed a quarter of a volume, half a volume, 
three quarters of a volume, a whole volume, and 
even more, time and time again. He did this, to 
my mind, because he fancied nervously that he 
must write, that he had to write, and began 
without adequate preparation. It became ab- 
solutely tragic, for he commenced work know- 
ing that he would destroy it, and knowing the 
pain such destruction would cost him, when a 
little rest might have enabled him to begin cheer- 
fully with a fresh mind. I used to suggest this 
to him, but it was entirely useless. He would 
begin, and destroy, and begin again, and then 
only partially satisfy himself at last when he 
was in a state of financial desperation, with the 
ditch or the workhouse in front of him. 

In this he never seemed to learn by experi- 
ence. It was a curious futility, which was all 
the odder because he was so peculiarly conscious 
of a certain kind of futility exhibited by our 
friend Schmidt. He used to write to Maitland 
at least a dozen times a year from Potsdam. 
These letters were all almost invariably read 
to me. They afforded Maitland extraordinary 
amusement and real pleasure, and yet great pain. 
Schmidt used to begin the letter with some- 
thing like this: '^I have been spending the last 
month or two in deep meditation on the work 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 179 

which it lies in my power to do. I have now 
discovered that I was not meant to write fiction. 
I am therefore putting it resolutely aside, and 
am turning to history, to which I shall hence- 
forward devote my life." About two months 
later Maitland would read me a portion of a 
letter which began: "I have been much 
troubled these last two months, and have been 
considering my own position and my own en- 
dowments with the greatest interest. I find that 
I have been mistaken in thinking that I had 
any powers which would enable me to write his- 
tory in a satisfactory manner. I see that I am 
essentially a philosopher. Henceforth I shall 
devote myself to philosophy." Again, a month 
or two after, there would come a letter from 
him, making another statement as if he had 
never made one before: ^^I am glad to say that 
I have at last discovered my own line. After 
much thought I am putting aside philosophy. 
Henceforward I devote myself to fiction." 
This kind of thing occurred not once but twenty 
or thirty times, and the German for ever wrote 
as if he had never written anything before with 
regard to his own powers and capabilities. One 
is reminded forcibly of a similar case in Eng- 
land, that of J. K. Stephen. 

As I have been speaking of "Paternoster 
Row," it is very interesting to observe that Mait- 



180 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

land was frequently writing most directly of 
himself in that book. It is curious that in this, 
one of his most successful novels, he should have 
recognised his own real limitations. He says 
that '^no native impulse had directed him to 
novel-writing. His intellectual temper was 
that of the student, the scholar, but strongly 
blended with a love of independence which had 
always made him think with detestation of a 
teacher's life." He goes on to speak of the 
stories which his hero wrote, "scraps of imma- 
ture psychology, the last thing a magazine would 
accept from an unknown man." It may be that 
he was thinking here of some of his own short 
stories, for which I was truly responsible. Year 
after year I suggested that he should do some, 
as they were, on the whole, the easiest way of 
making a little money. Naturally I had amaz- 
ing trouble with him because it was a new line, 
but I returned to the charge in season and out 
of season, every Sunday and every week-day that 
I saw him, and every time I wrote. We were 
both perfectly conscious that he had not the art 
of writing dramatic short stories which were es- 
sentially popular. There is no doubt that he 
did not possess this faculty. When one goes 
through his shorter work one discovers few in- 
deed which are stories or properly related to the 
conte. They are, indeed, often scraps of psy- 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 181 

chology, sometimes perhaps a little crude, but 
the crudeness is mostly in the construction. 
They are in fact rather possible passages from a 
book than short stories. Nevertheless he did 
fairly well with these when he worked with 
an agent, which he did finally and at last on 
continued pressure from me. I notice, how- 
ever, that in his published volumes of short 
stories there are several missing which I should 
like to see again. I do not know whether they 
are good, but two or three that I remember 
vaguely were published, I believe, in the old 
"Temple Bar." One was a story about a don- 
key, which I entirely forget, and another was 
called "Mr. Why." It was about a poor man, 
not wholly sane, who lived in one room and left 
all that that room contained to some one else 
upon his death. On casual search it seemed that 
the room contained nothing, but the heir or 
heiress discovered at last on the top of an old 
cupboard Why's name written large in piled 
half-crowns. 

It may have been noticed by some that he 
spoke in the little "Gillman" set of verses which 
I have quoted, of "Hendersonian bores." This 
perhaps requires comment. For one who loved 
his Rabelais and the free-spoken classics of our 
own tongue, Maitland had an extreme purity of 
thought and speech, a thing which one might 



182 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

not, in some ways, have looked for. No one, I 
think, would have dared to tell him a gross story, 
which did not possess remarkable wit or liter- 
ary merit, more than once. His reception of 
such tales was never cordial, and I remember 
his peculiar and astounding indignation at one 
incident. Somehow or another he had become 
acquainted with an East End clergyman named 
Henderson. This Henderson had, I believe, 
read "The Under World,'' or one of the books 
dealing with the kind of parishioner that he was 
acquainted with, and had written to Maitland. 
In a way they became friends, or at any rate 
acquaintances, for the clergyman too was a pe- 
culiarly lonely man. He occasionally came to 
7 K, and I myself met him there. He was a 
man wholly misplaced, in fact he was an abso- 
lute atheist. Still, he had a cure of souls some- 
where the other side of the Tower, and laboured, 
as I understood, not unfaithfully. He frequently 
discussed his mental point of view with Mait- 
land and often used to write to him. By some 
native kink in his mind he used to put into these 
letters indecent words. I suppose he thought 
it was a mere outspoken literary habit. As 
a matter of fact this enraged Maitland so fu- 
riously that he brought the letters to me, and 
showing them demanded my opinion as to what 
he should do. He said: "This kind of con- 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 183 

duct is outrageous! What am I to do about 
it?" Now, it never occurred to Maitland in a 
matter like this, or indeed in any matter, to be 
absolutely outspoken and straightforward. He 
was always so afraid of hurting people's feel- 
ings. I said: '^It is perfectly obvious what to 
do. My good man, if you don't like it, write 
and tell him that you don't." This was to him 
a perfectly impossible solution of a very great 
difficulty. How it was solved I do not exactly 
remember, but I do know that we afterwards 
saw very little of Mr. Henderson, who is em- 
balmed, like a poor fly, in the "Gillman" poem. 

It was characteristic, and one of the causes of 
his continued disastrous troubles, that Maitland 
was incapable of being abruptly or strenuously 
straightforward. A direct ''No," or "This shall 
not be done," seemed to him, no doubt, to invite 
argument and struggle, the one thing he invaria- 
bly procured for himself by invariably avoid- 
ing it. 

"Paternoster Row," was written, if I remem- 
ber rightly, partly in 1890, and finished in 1891, 
in which year it was published. It is an odd 
thing to think of that he was married to his 
second wife in March 1891, shortly before this 
book came out. In the third volume there is 
practically a strange and bitter, and very re- 
markable, forecast of the result of that marriage, 



184 HENRY MAITLAND 

showing that whilst Maitland's instincts and im- 
pulses ran away with him, his intellect was yet 
clear and cold. It is the passage where the 
hero suggests that he should have married some 
simple, kind-hearted work-girl. He says, 'We 
should have lived in a couple of poor rooms some- 
where, and — we should have loved each other." 
Whereupon Gifford — here Maitland's intellect 
— exclaims upon him for a shameless idealist, 
and sketches, most truly the likely issue of such 
a marriage, given Maitland or Reardon. He 
says : "To begin with, the girl would have mar- 
ried you in firm persuasion that you were a 
'gentleman' in temporary difficulties, and that 
before long you would have plenty of money to 
dispose of. Disappointed in this hope, she 
would have grown sharp-tempered, querulous, 
selfish. All your endeavours to make her under- 
stand you would only have resulted in widening 
the impassable gulf. She would have miscon- 
strued your every sentence, found food for sus- 
picion in every harmless joke, tormented you 
with the vulgarest forms of jealousy. The ef- 
fect upon your nature would have been degrad- 
ing." Never was anything more true. 



CHAPTER VIII 

WHATEVER kind of disaster his mar- 
riage was to be for Maitland, there is 
no doubt that it was for me also some- 
thing in the nature of a catastrophe. There are 
marriages and marriages. By some of them a 
man's friend gains, and by others he loses, and 
they are the more frequent, for it is one of the 
curiosities of human life that a man rarely finds 
his friend's wife sympathetic. As it was, I knew 
that in a sense I had now lost Henry Maitland, 
or had partially lost him, to say the least of it. 
Unfair as it was to the woman, I felt very bit- 
ter against her, and he knew well what I felt. 
Thinking of her as I did, anything like free hu- 
man intercourse with his new household would 
be impossible, unless, indeed, the affair turned 
out other than I expected. And then he had 
left London and gone to his beloved Devonshire. 
How much he loved it those who have read 'The 
Meditations" can tell, for all that is said there 
about that county was very sincere, as I can 
vouch for. Born himself in a grim part of 
Yorkshire, and brought up in Mirefields and 

185 



186 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

Moorhampton, that rainy and gloomy city of the 
north, he loved the sweet southern county. And 
yet it is curious to recognise what a strange pas- 
sion was his for London. He had something 
of the same passion for it as Johnson had, al- 
though the centre of London for him was not 
Fleet Street but the British Museum and its 
great library. He wrote once to his doctor 
friend: ''I dare not settle far from London, as 
it means ill-health to me to be out of reach of 
the literary 'world' — a small world enough, 
truly.'' But, of course, it was most extraordi- 
narily his world. He was a natural bookworm 
compelled to spin fiction. And yet he did love 
the country, though he now found no peace 
there. With his wife peace was impossible, and 
this I soon learnt from little things that he wrote 
to me, though he was for the first few months 
of his marriage exceedingly delicate on this sub- 
ject, as if he were willing to give her every 
possible chance. I was only down in Devon- 
shire once while he was there with his wife. I 
went a little trip in a steamship to Dartmouth, 
entering its narrow and somewhat hazardous 
harbour in the middle of the great blizzard 
which that year overwhelmed the south of Eng- 
land, and especially the south of Devon, in the 
heaviest snow drifts. When I did at last get 
away from Dartmouth, I found things obviously 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 187 

not all they should be, though very little was 
said about it between us. I remember we went 
out for a walk together, going through paths 
cut in snow drifts twelve or even fifteen feet in 
depth. Though such things had been a common 
part of some of my own experiences they were 
wonderfully new to Maitland, and made him 
for a time curiously exhilarated. I did not stay 
long in Devon, nor, as a matter of fact, did he. 
For though he had gone there meaning to set- 
tle, he found the lack of the British Museum 
and his literary world too much for him, and 
besides that his wife, a girl of the London streets 
and squares, loathed the country, and whined in 
her characteristic manner about its infinite dul- 
ness. Thus it was that he soon left the west and 
took a small house in Ewell, about which he 
wrote me constant jeremiads. 

He believed, with no rare ignorance, as those 
who are acquainted with the methods of the old 
cathedral builders will know, that all honest 
work had been done of old, that all old builders 
were honourable men, and that modern work 
was essentially unsound. He had never learned 
that the first question the instructed ask the at- 
tendant verger on entering a cathedral is: 
"When did the tower fall down?" It rarely 
happens that one is not instantly given a date, 
not always very long after that particular tower 



188 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

was completed. I remember that it annoyed 
him very much when I proved to him by docu- 
mentary evidence that a great portion of the 
work in Peterborough Cathedral was of the most 
shocking and scandalous description. Never- 
theless these facts do not excuse the modern jerry- 
builder, and the condition of his house was one, 
though only one, of the perpetual annoyances he 
had to encounter. 

But, after all, though pipes break and the roof 
leaks, that is nothing if peace dwells in a house. 
There could be no peace in Maitland's house, 
for his wife had neither peace nor any under- 
j standing. Naturally enough she was an unedu- 
cated woman. She had read nothing but what 
such people read. It is true she did not speak 
badly. For some reason which I cannot under- 
stand she was not wholly without aspirates. 
Nevertheless many of her locutions were vul- 
gar, and she had no natural refinement. This, 
I am sure, would have mattered little, and per- 
haps nothing, if she had been a simple house- 
Iwife, some actual creature of the kitchen like 
Rousseau's Therese. As I have said, I think 
that Maitland was really incapable of a great 
i passion, and I am sure that he would have put 
;up with the merest haus-frau, if she had known 
her work and possessed her patient soul in quiet 
without any lamentations. If there was any la- 



OF HEXRY MAITLAXD 189 

menting to be done Maitland himself might 
have done it in choice terms not without hu- 
mour. And indeed he did lament, and not 
without cause. On my first visit to Ewell after 
his return from Devon I again met Mrs. Mait- 
land. She made me exceedingly uneasy, both 
personally, as I had no sympathy for her, and 
also out of fear for his future. It did not take 
me long to discover that they were then living 
on the verge of a daily quarrel, that a dispute 
was for ever imminent, and that she frequently 
broke out into actual violence and the smashing 
of crockery. While I was w^ith them she per- 
petually made whining and complaining re- 
marks to me about him in his very presence. 
She said: ^'Henry does not like the way I do 
this, or the way I say that." She asked thus for 
my sympathy, casting bitter looks at her hus- 
band. On one occasion she even abused him to 
my face, and after^vards I heard her anger in the 
passage outside, so that I actually hated her and 
found it very hard to be civil. 

By this time I had established a habit of never 
spending any time in the company of folks who 
neither pleased nor interested me. I commend 
this custom to any one who has any work to do 
in the world. Thus my forthcoming refusal to 
see any more of her was anticipated by Mait- 
land, who had a pow^erful intuition of the feel- 



190 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

ings I entertained for his wife. In fact, things 
soon became so bad that he found it necessary 
to speak to me on the subject, as it was soon 
nearly impossible for any one to enter his house 
for fear of an exhibition of rage, or even of pos- 
sible incivility to the guest himself. As he said, 
she developed the temper of a devil, and began 
to make his life not less wretched, though it 
was in another way, than the poor creature had 
done who was now in her grave. Naturally, 
however, as we had been together so much, I 
could not and would not give up seeing him. 
But we had to meet at the station, and going to 
the hotel would sit in the smoking-room to have 
our talk. These talks were now not wholly of 
books or of our work, but often of his miseries. 
One day when I found him especially depressed 
he complained that it was almost impossible for 
him to get sufficient peace to do any of his work. 
On hearing this the notion came to me that, 
though I had been unable to prevent hirn marry- 
ing this woman, I might at any rate make the 
suggestion that he should take his courage in 
both his hands and leave her. But I was in no 
hurry to put this into his head so long as there 
seemed any possibility of some kind of peace 
being established. However, she grew worse 
daily, or so I heard, and at last I spoke. 

He answered my proposal in accents of de- 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 191 

spair, and I found that he was now expecting 
within a few months his first child's birth. 
Under many conditions this might have been a 
joy to him, but now it was no joy. And yet 
there was, he said, some possibility that after 
this event things might improve. I recognised 
such a possibility without much hope of its ever 
becoming a reality. Indeed it was a vain hope. 
It is true enough that for a time, the month or 
so while she was still weak after childbirth, she 
was unable to be actively offensive; but, hon- 
estly, I think the only time he had any peace 
was before she was able to get up and move about 
the house. During the last weeks of her con- 
valescence she vented her temper and exercised 
her uncivil tongue upon the nurses, more than 
one of whom left the house, finding it impossi- 
ble to stay with her. However he was at any 
rate more or less at peace in his own writing 
room during this period. When she again be- 
came well I gathered the real state of the case 
from him both from letters and conversations, 
and I saw that eventually he would and must 
leave her. Knowing him as I did, I was aware 
that there would be infinite trouble, pain, and 
worry before this was accomplished, and yet the 
symptoms of the whole situation pointed out the 
inevitable end. I had not the slightest remorse 
in doing my best to bring this about, but in those 



192 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

days I had trouble enough of my own upon my 
shoulders, and found it impossible to see him 
so often as I wished; especially as a visit from 
me, or from anybody else, always meant the loss 
of a day's work to him. Yet I know that he 
bore ten thousand times more than I myself 
would have borne in similar circumstances, and 
I shall give a wrong impression of him if any 
one thinks that most of his complaints and con- 
fessions were not dragged out of him by me. He 
did not always complain readily, but one saw 
the trouble in his eyes. Yet now it became evi- 
dent that he would and must revolt at last. It 
grew so clear at last, that I wanted him to do 
it at once and save himself years of misery, but 
to act like that, not wholly out of pressing and 
urgent necessity but out of wisdom and fore- 
sight, was wholly beyond Henry Maitland. 

It was in such conditions that the child was 
born and spent the first months of its life. Those 
who have read his books, and have seen the pain- 
ful paternal interest he has more than once de- 
picted, will understand how bitterly he felt that 
his child, the human being for whose existence 
he was responsible, should be brought up in such 
conditions by a mother whose temper and con- 
duct suggested almost actual madness. He 
wrote to me: ''My dire need at present is for 
a holiday. It is five years since I had a real 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 193 

rest from writing, and I begin to feel worn out. 
It is not only the fatigue of inventing and writ- 
ing; at the same time I keep house and bring 
up the boy, and the strain, I can assure you, is 
rather severe. What I am now trying to do 
is to accumulate money enough to allow of my 
resting, at all events from this ceaseless produc- 
tion, for half a year or so. It profits me noth- 
ing to feel that there is a market for my work, 
if the work itself tells so severely upon me. Be- 
fore long I shall really be unable to write at all. 
I am trying to get a few short stories done, but 
the effort is fearful. The worst of it is, I can- 
not get away by myself. It makes me very un- 
comfortable to leave the house, even for a day. 
I foresee that until the boy is several years older 
there will be no possibility of freedom for me. 
Of one thing I have very seriously thought, and 
that is whether it would be possible to give up 
housekeeping altogether, and settle as boarders 
in some family on the Continent. The servant 
question is awful, and this might be an escape 
from it, but of course there are objections. I 
might find all my difEculties doubled." 

I do not think that this letter requires much 
comment or illustration. Although it is written 
soberly enough, and without actual accusation, 
its meaning is as plain as daylight. His wife 
was alternately too familiar, or at open hostility 



194 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

with the servant; none could endure her tem- 
per. She complained to him, or the servant 
complained to him, and he had to make peace, 
or to try to make it — mostly in vain. And then 
the quarrel broke out anew, and the servant left. 
The result was that Maitland himself often did 
the household work when he should have been 
writing. He was dragged away from his or- 
dinary tasks by an uproar in the kitchen; or 
perhaps one or both of the angry women came 
to him for arbitration about some point of com- 
mon decency. There is a phrase of his in 'The 
Meditations" which speaks of poor Hooker, 
whose prose he so much admired, being "vixen- 
haunted." This epithet of his is a reasonable 
and admirable one, but how bitter it was few 
know so well as myself. 

In this place it does not seem to me unnatural 
or out of place to comment a little on Raymond, 
the chief character in 'The Vortex." He was 
undoubtedly in a measure the later Maitland. 
His idea was to present a man whose character 
developed with somewhat undue slowness. He 
said that Raymond would probably never have 
developed at all after a certain stage but for the 
curious changes wrought in his views and senti- 
ments by the fact of his becoming a father. Of 
course it must be obvious to any one, from what 
I have said, that Maitland himself would never 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 195 

have remained so long with his second wife after 
the first few months if it had not been that she 
was about to become a mother. The earlier pas- 
sages in ^The Vortex" where he speaks about 
children, or where Raymond himself speaks 
about them, are meant to contrast strongly with 
his way of thinking in the later part of the book 
when this particular character had children of 
his own. The author declared that Raymond, 
as a bachelor, was largely an egoist. Of course 
the truth of the matter is that Maitland himself 
was essentially an egoist. I once suggested to 
him that he came near being a solipsist, a word 
he probably had never heard of till then, as he 
never studied psychology, modern or other- 
wise. However, when Raymond grew riper in 
the experience which killed his crude egoism, 
he became another man. Maitland, in writing 
about this particular book, said: *'That Ray- 
mond does nothing is natural to the man. The 
influences of the whirlpool — that is London — 
and its draught on the man's vitality embarrass 
any efficiency there might have been in him." 
Through the whole story of Maitland one feels 
that everything that was in any way hostile to 
his own views of life did essentially embarrass, 
and almost make impossible, anything that was 
in him. He had no strength to draw nutriment 
by main force from everything around him, as 



196 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

a strong man does. He was not so fierce a fire 
as to burn every kind of fuel. 

I remember in this connection a very inter- 
esting passage in Hamley's "Operations of 
War" : "When a general surveying the map of 
the theatre finds direct obstacles in the path he 
must advance by, he sees in them, if he be con- 
fident of his skill in manoeuvring, increased op- 
portunities for obtaining strategical successes 
... in fact, like any other complications in a 
game, they offer on both sides additional oppor- 
tunities to skill and talent, and additional em- 
barrassments to incapacity." But then Maitland 
loathed and hated and feared obstacles of every 
kind. He w^as apt to sit down before them 
wringing his hands, and only desperation moved 
him, not to attack, but to elude them. It is 
an odd thing in this respect to note that he 
played no games, and despised them with pecu- 
liar vigour. There is a passage in one of his 
letters to Rivers about a certain Evans, men- 
tioned with a note of exclamation, and thus 
kindly embalmed: "Evans, strange being! 
Yet, if his soul is satisfied with golf and bridge, 
why should he not go on golfing and bridging? 
At all events he is working his way to sincer- 
ity." 

The long letter I quoted from above was writ- 
ten, I believe, in 1895, when the boy was nearly 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 197 

three years old. I have not attempted, and shall 
not attempt, to give any detailed account month 
by month, or even year by year, of his domestic 
surroundings. It was a wonder to me that the 
marriage lasted, but still it did last, and all one 
knew was that some day it must come to an end. 
The record of his life in these days would be 
appalling if I remembered it sufficiently, or had 
kept a diary — as no doubt I ought to have done 
— or had all the documents which may be in 
existence dealing with that time. That he en- 
dured so many years was incredible, and still 
he did endure, and the time went on, and he 
worked; mostly, as he said to me, against time, 
and a good deal on commission. He wrote: 
"The old fervours do not return to me, and I 
have got into the very foolish habit of perpetu- 
ally writing against time and to order. The 
end of this is destruction." But still I think he 
knew within him that it could not last. Had it 
not been for the boy, and, alas, for the birth of 
yet another son, he would now have left her. 
He acknowledged it to me — if he could not fight 
he would have to fly. 

This extraordinary lack of power to deal with 
any obstacle must seem strange to most men, 
though no doubt many are weak. Yet few are 
so weak as Maitland. Oddly enough I have 
heard the idea expressed that there was more 



198 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

power of fight in Maitland than he ever pos- 
sessed, and on inquiry I have learned that this 
notion v^as founded on a partial, or perhaps com- 
plete misunderstanding of certain things he ex- 
pressed in the latter part of "The Vortex." To- 
wards the end of the book it seems to be sug- 
gested that Maitland, or Raymond, tended 
really towards what he calls in one of his letters 
a "barrack-room'' view of life. Some people 
seem to think that the man who was capable 
of writing what he did in that book really meant 
it, and must have had a little touch of that na- 
tive and natural brutality which makes English- 
men what they are. But Maitland himself, in 
commenting on this particular attitude of Ray- 
mond, declared that this quasi or semi-ironic 
imperialism of the man was nothing but his 
hopeless recognition of facts which filled him 
with disgust. The world was going in a cer- 
tain way. There was no refusing to see it. It 
stared every one in the eyes. Then he adds: 
"But what a course for things to take!" 

Raymond in fact talks with a little throwing 
up of the arm, and in a voice of quiet sarcasm, 
"Go ahead — I sit by and watch, and wonder 
what will be the end of it all." This was his 
own habit of mind in later years. He had come 
at last and at long last, to recognise a course 
of things which formerly he could not, or would 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 199 

not, perceive; and he recognised it with just that 
tossing of arm or head, involuntary of course. 
I do not think that at this time he would have 
seen a battalion of Guards go by and have 
turned to me saying: *'And this, this is the 
nineteenth century!" He once wrote to Rivers, 
what he had said a hundred times to me: 
*^I have a conviction that all I love and believe 
in is going to the devil. At the same time I 
try to watch with interest this process of destruc- 
tion, admiring any bit of sapper work that is 
well done." It is rather amusing to note that 
in the letter, written in the country, which puts 
these things most dolefully, he adds : ^'The life 
here shows little trace of vortical influence." 
Of course this is a reference to the whirlpool of 
London. 

In 1896 I was myself married, and went to 
live in a little house in Fulham. I understood 
what peace was, and he had none. As Mait- 
land had not met my wife for some years I asked 
him to come and dine with us. It was not the 
least heavy portion of his burden that he always 
left his own house with anxiety and returned to 
it with fear and trembling. This woman of his 
home was given to violence, even with her own 
young children. It was possible, as he knew, 
for he often said so to me, that he might re- 
turn and find even the baby badly injured. And 



200 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

yet at last he made up his mind to accept my in- 
vitation. Whether it was the fact that he had 
accepted one from me — and I often fancy that 
his wife had a grudge against me because I 
would not go to her house any more — I do not 
know, but when I met him in the hall of my 
own house I found him in the most extraordi- 
nary state of nervous and physical agitation. 
Though usually of a remarkable, if healthy, pal- 
lor, he was now almost crimson, and his eyes 
sparkled with furious indignation. He was hot, 
just as if he had come out of an actual physical 
struggle. What he must have looked like when 
he left Ewell I do not know, for he had had 
all the time necessary to travel from there to 
Fulham to cool down in. After we shook hands 
he asked me, almost breathlessly, to allow him to 
wash his face, so I took him into the bathroom. 
He removed his coat, and producing his elastic 
band from his waistcoat pocket, put it about his 
hair like a fillet, and began to wash his face in 
cold water. As he was drying himself he broke 
out suddenly: "I can't stand it any more. I 
have left her for ever." I said: "Thank 
heaven that you have. I am very glad of it 
— and for every one's sake don't go back on it." 
Whatever the immediate cause of this out- 
burst was, it seems that that afternoon the whole 
trouble came to a culmination. The wife be- 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 201 

haved like a maniac; she shrieked, and struck 
him. She abused him in the vilest terms, such 
as he could not or would not repeat to me. It 
was with the greatest difficulty that I at last 
got him calm enough to meet any one else. 
When he did calm down after he had had some- 
thing to eat and a little to drink, the prospect 
of his freedom, which he believed had come to 
him once more, inspired him with pathetic and 
peculiar exhilaration. In one sense I think he 
was happy that night. He slept in London. 

I should have given a wholly false impres- 
sion of Maitland if any one now imagined that 
I believed that the actual end had come to his 
marriage. No man knew his weakness better 
than I did, and I moved heaven and earth in 
my endeavours to keep him to his resolution, to 
prevent him going back to Epsom on any pre- 
text, and all my efforts were vain. In three 
days I learned that his resolution had broken 
down. By the help of some busybody who had 
more kindness than intelligence, they patched 
up a miserable peace, and he went back to Ewell. 
And yet that peace was no peace. Maitland, 
perhaps the most sensitive man alive, had to en- 
dure the people in the neighbouring houses com- 
ing out upon the doorstep, eager to inquire what 
disaster was occurring in the next house. There 
were indeed legends in the Epsom Road that the 



202 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

mild looking writer beat and brutalised his wife, 
though most knew, by means of servants' chatter, 
what the actual facts were. 

It was in this year that he did at last take an 
important step which cost him much anxiety be- 
fore putting it through. His fears for his eldest 
child were so extreme that he induced his peo- 
ple in the north to give the child a home — the 
influence and example of the mother he could 
no longer endure for the boy. His wife parted 
with the child without any great difficulty, 
though of course she made it an occasion for 
abusing her husband in every conceivable way. 
He wrote to me in the late summer of that year: 
"I much want to see you, but just now it is im- 
possible for me to get to town, and the present 
discomfort of everything here forbids me to ask 
you to come. I am straining every nerve to get 
some work done, for really it begins to be a ques- 
tion whether I shall ever again finish a book. 
Interruptions are so frequent and so serious. 
The so-called holiday has been no use to me; a 
mere waste of time — but I was obliged to go, 
for only in that way could I have a few weeks 
with the boy who, as I have told you, lives now 
at Mirefields and will continue to live there. I 
shall never let him come back to my own dwell- 
ing. Have patience with me, old friend, for I 
am hard beset." He ends this letter with : "If 



OF HEXRY MAITLAXD 203 

the boy grows up in clean circumstances, that 
will be my one satisfaction." 

Whether he had peace or not he still w^orked 
prodigiously, though not perhaps for so many 
hours as was his earlier custom. But his health 
about this time began to fail. Much of this 
came from his habits of work, which were en- 
tirely incompatible with continued health of 
brain and body. He once said to Rivers: 
"Visitors — I fall sick with terror in thinking of 
them. If by rare chance any one comes here it 
means to me the loss of a whole day, a most 
serious matter." And his whole day was, of 
course, a long day. No man of letters can pos- 
sibly sit for ever at the desk during eight hours, 
as was frequently "his brave custom" as he 
phrased it somewhere. If he had worked in a 
more reasonable manner, and had been satisfied 
with doing perhaps a thousand words a day, 
which is not at all an unreasonably small amount 
for a man who works steadily through most of 
the year, his health might never have broken 
down in the way it did. He had been moved 
in a way towards these hours, partly by actual 
desperation; partly by the great loneliness 
which had been thrust upon him; very largely 
by the want of money which prevented him 
from amusing himself in the manner of the aver- 
age man, but chiefly by his sense of devotion to 



204 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

what he was doing. One of his favourite stories 
was that of Heyne, the great classical scholar, 
who was reported to work sixteen hours a day. 
This he did, according to the literary tradition, 
for the whole of his working life, except upon 
the day when he was married. He made, for 
that occasion only, a compact with the bride that 
he was to be allowed to work half his usual 
stint. And half Heyne's usual amount was 
Maitland's whole day, which I maintain was at 
least five hours too much. This manner of 
working, combined with his quintessential and 
habitual loneliness made it very hard, not only 
upon him, but also on his friends. It was quite 
impossible to see him, even about matters of 
comparative urgency, unless a meeting had been 
arranged beforehand. For even after his work 
was done, it was never done. He started pre- 
paring for the next day, turning over phrases 
in his mind, and considering the next chapter. 
I believe that in one point I was very useful to 
him in this matter, for I suggested to him, as 
I have done to others, that my own practice of 
finishing a chapter and then writing some two 
or three lines of the next one while my mind was 
warm upon the subject, was a vast help for the 
next day's labour. 

Now the way he worked was this. After 
breakfast, at nine o'clock, he sat down and 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 205 

worked till one. Then he had his midday meal, 
and took a little walk. In the afternoon, about 
half-past three, he sat down again and wrote 
till six o'clock or a little after. Then he worked 
again from half-past seven to ten. I very much 
doubt whether there is any modern writer who 
has ever tried to keep up work at this rate who 
did not end in a hospital or a lunatic asylum, 
or die young. To my mind it shows, in a way 
that nothing else can, that he had no earthly 
business to be writing novels and spinning things 
largely out of his subjective mind, when he 
ought to have been dealing with the objective 
world, or with books. I myself write with a 
certain amount of ease. It may, indeed, be dif- 
ficult to start, but when a thing is begun I go 
straight ahead, writing steadily for an hour, or 
perhaps an hour and a half — rarely any more. 
I have then done my day's work, which is now 
very seldom more than two thousand words, al- 
though on one memorable occasion I actually 
wrote thirteen thousand words with the pen in 
ten hours. Maitland used to write three or four 
of his slips, as he called them, which were 
small quarto pages of very fine paper, and on 
each slip there were twelve hundred words. 
Whether he wrote one, or two, or three slips in 
the day he took an equal length of time. 

Among my notes I find one about a letter of 



206 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

his written in June 1895 to Mrs. Lake, declin- 
ing an invitation to visit Dr. Lake's house which, 
no doubt, would have done him a great deal 
of good. He says: "Let me put before you 
an appalling list of things that have to be done, 
(i) Serial story (only begun) of about eighty 
thousand words. (2) Short novel for Cassell's 
to be sent in by end of October. Neither be- 
gun nor thought of. (3) Six short stories for 
the English Illustrated — neither begun nor 
thought of. (4) Twenty papers for The 
Sketch of a thousand words each. Dimly fore- 
seen." Now to a man who had the natural gift 
of writing fiction and some reasonable time to 
do it in, this would seem no such enormous 
amount of work. For Maitland it was appall- 
ing, not so much, perhaps, on account of the ac- 
tual amount of labour — if it had been one book 
— but for its variousness. He moved from one 
thing to another in fiction with great slowness. 

As I have said, his health was not satisfactory. 
I shall have something to say about this in de- 
tail a little later. It was his own opinion, and 
that of certain doctors, that his lung was really 
afifected by tuberculosis. Of this I had then 
very serious doubts. But he wrote in January 
1897: 'The weather and my lung are keeping 
me indoors at present, but I should much like 
to come to you. Waterpipes freezing — a five- 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 207 

pound note every winter to the plumber. Of 
course this is distinctly contrived by the building 
fraternity." 

But things were not always as bad as may be 
gathered from a casual consideration of what I 
have said. In writing a life events come too 
thickly. For instance in 1897 he wrote to me: 
"Happily things are far from being as bad as 
last year." It appears that a certain lady, a 
Miss Greathead, about whom I really know 
nothing but what he told me, interested herself 
with the utmost kindness in his domestic affairs. 
He wrote to me: "Miss Greathead has been 
of very great use, and will continue to be so, I 
think. This house is to be given up in any case 
at Michaelmas, and another will not be taken 
till I see my way more clearly. Where I my- 
self shall live during the autumn is uncertain. 
We must meet in the autumn. Work on — I 
have plans for seven books." 



CHAPTER IX 

WHAT dismal catastrophe or prolonged 
domestic uproar led to the final end of 
his married life in 1897 I do not know. 
Nor have I cared to inquire very curiously. 
The fact remains, and it was inevitable. To- 
wards the end of the summer he made up his 
mind to go to Italy in September. He wrote 
to me: '^All work in England is at an end for 
me just now. I shall be away till next spring 
— looking forward with immense delight to soli- 
tude. Of course I have a great deal to do as 
soon as I can settle, which I think will be at 
Siena first." As a matter of fact the very next 
letter of his which I possess came to me from 
Siena. He said: ^'I am so confoundedly hard 
at work upon the Novelists book that I find it 
very difficult to write my letters. Thank 
heaven, more than half is done. I shall go 
south about the tenth of November. It is dull 
here, and I should not stay for the pleasure of it. 
You know that I do not care much for Tuscany. 
The landscape is never striking about here, and 
one does not get the glorious colour of the 

208 



HENRY MAITLAND 209 

south." So one sees how Italy had awakened 
his colour sense. As I have said, it was after 
his first visit to Italy that I noted, both in his 
books and his conversation, an acute awakening 
passion for colour. I think it grew in him to 
the end of his life. He ended this last letter 
to me with: "Well, well, let us get as soon as 
possible into Magna Graecia and the old dead 
world." 

I said some time ago that I had finished all I 
had to write about the Victorian novelists, and 
yet I find there is something still to say of Dick- 
ens, and it is not against the plan of such a ram- 
bling book as this to put it down here and now. 
When he went to Siena to write his book of 
criticism it seemed to me a very odd choice of a 
place for such a piece of work, and indeed I 
wondered at his undertaking it at any price. It 
is quite obvious to all those who really under- 
stand his attitude towards criticism of modern 
things that great as his interest was in Dickens 
it would never have impelled him to write a 
strong, rough, critical book mostly about him 
had it not been for the necessity of making 
money. Indeed he expressed so much to me, 
and I find again in a letter that he wrote to Mrs. 
Rivers, with whom he was now on very friendly 
terms, "I have made a good beginning with my 
critical book, and long to have done with it, for 



210 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

of course it is an alien subject." No doubt there 
are at least two classes of Maitland's readers, 
those who understand the man and love his 
really characteristic work, and those who have 
no understanding of him at all, or any deep 
appreciation, but probably profess a great ad- 
miration for this book which they judge by the 
part on Dickens. I think that Andrew Lang 
was one of these, judging from a criticism that 
he once wrote on Maitland. I know that I 
have often heard people of intelligence express 
so high an opinion of the '^Victorian Novelists" 
as to imply a lack of appreciation of his other 
work. The study is no doubt written with much 
skill, and with a good writer's command of his 
subject, and command of himself. That is to 
say, he manages by skill to make people believe 
he was sufficiently interested in his subject to 
write about it. To speak plainly he thought it 
a pure waste of time, except from the mere finan- 
cial point of view, just as he did his cutting down 
of Mayhew's ''Life of Dickens" — which, indeed, 
he considered a gross outrage, but professed his 
inability to refuse the ''debauched temptation" of 
the hundred and fifty pounds offered him for the 
work. 

It would be untrue if I seemed to suggest that 
he was not enthusiastic about Dickens, even more 
so than I am myself save at certain times and 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 211 

seasons. For me Dickens is a man for times and 
periods. I cannot read him for years, and then 
I read him all. What I do mean is that Mait- 
land's love of this author, or of Thackeray say, 
would never have impelled him to write. Yet 
there is much in the book which is of great inter- 
est, if it were only as matter of comment on Mait- 
land's own self. The other day I came across 
one sentence which struck me curiously. It was 
where Maitland asked the reader to imagine 
Charles Dickens occupied in the blacking ware- 
house for ten years. He said: "Picture him 
striving vainly to find utterance for the thoughts 
that were in him, refused the society of any but 
boors and rascals, making perhaps futile attempts 
to succeed as an actor, and in full manhood meas- 
uring the abyss which sundered him from all he 
had hoped." When I came to the passage I put 
the book down and pondered for a while, know- 
ing well that as Maitland wrote these words he 
was thinking even more of himself than of Dick- 
ens, and knowing that what was not true of his 
subject was most bitterly true of the writer. 
There is another passage somewhere in the book 
in which he says that Dickens could not have 
struggled for long years against lack of appre- 
ciation. This he rightly puts down to Dickens* 
essentially dramatic leanings. The man needed 
immediate applause. But again Maitland was 



212 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

thinking of himself, for he had indeed struggled 
many years without any appreciation save that 
of one or two friends and some rare birds among 
the public. I sometimes think that one of Mait- 
land's great attractions to Dickens lay in the fact, 
which he himself mentions and enlarges on, that 
Dickens treated of the lower middle class and the 
class immediately beneath it. This is where the 
great novelist was at his best, and in the same 
way these were the only classes that Maitland 
really knew well. There is in several things a 
curious likeness between Dickens and Maitland, 
though it lies not on the surface. He says that 
Dickens never had any command of a situation 
although he was so very strong in incident. This 
was also a great weakness of Henry Maitland. 
It rarely happens that he works out a powerful 
and dramatic situation to its final limits, though 
sometimes he does succeed in doing so. This 
failure in dealing with great situations is pecul- 
iarly characteristic of most English novelists. I 
have frequently noticed in otherwise admirable 
books by men of very considerable abilities and 
attainments, with tolerable command of their 
own language, that they have on every occasion 
shirked the great dramatic scene just when it 
was expected and needed. Perhaps this is due 
to the peculiar mauvaise honte of the English 
mind. To write, and yet not to give oneself 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 213 

away, seems to be the aim of too many writers, 
though the great aim of all great writing is to do, 
or to try to do, what they avoid. The final 
analysis of dreadful passion and pain comes, per- 
haps, too close to them. They feel the glow but 
also a sensation of shame in the great emotions. 
There are times that Maitland felt this, though 
perhaps unconsciously. It is at any rate certain 
that, like so many people, he never actually de- 
picted with blood and tears the frightful situ- 
ations in which his life was so extraordinarily 
full. 

It is an interesting passage in this book in 
which Maitland declares that great popularity 
was never yet attained by any one deliberately 
writing down to a low ideal. Above all men he 
knew that the artist was necessarily sincere, how- 
ever poor an artist he might be. So Rousseau in 
his ^'Confessions" asserts that nothing really great 
can come from an entirely venal pen. I remem- 
ber Maitland greatly enjoyed a story I told him 
about myself. While I was still a poverty- 
stricken and struggling writer my father, who 
had no knowledge whatever of the artistic tem- 
perament, although he had a very great apprecia- 
tion of the best literature of the past, came to me 
and said seriously : "My boy, if you want money 
and I know you do, why do you not write *Bow 
Bells Novelettes'? They will give you fifteen 



214 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

pounds for each of them." I replied to him, 
not I think without a tinge of bitterness at 
being so misunderstood: ''My dear sir, it is 
as much a matter oi natural endowment to be a 
damned fool as to be a great genius, and I am 
neither." 

I have said that Maitland was most essentially 
a conservative, indeed in many ways a reaction- 
ary, if one so passive can be called that. I think 
the only actual revolutionary utterance of his 
mind which stands on record is in the "Victorian 
Novelists." It is when he is speaking of Mr. 
Casby of the shorn locks. He wrote: "This 
question of landlordism should have been treated 
by Dickens on a larger scale. It remains one of 
the curses of English life, and is likely to do so 
till the victims of house-owners see their way to 
cutting, not the hair, but the throats, of a few se- 
lected specimens." 

It may seem a hard thing to say, but it is a fact, 
that any revolutionary sentiment there was in 
Maitland was excited, not by any native liberal- 
ism of his mind, or even by his sympathy for the 
suffering of others, but came directly out of his 
own personal miseries and trials. He had had to 
do with landlords who refused to repair their 
houses, and with houses which he looked upon 
as the result of direct and wicked conspiracy be- 
tween builders and plumbers. But his words 



OF HEXRY MAITLAXD 215 

are capable of a wider interpretation than he 
might have given them. 

If I had indeed been satisfied that this de- 
parture of Maitland's to Italy had meant the end 
of all the personal troubles of his marriage, I 
should have been highly satisfied, and not dis- 
pleased with any part I might have taken in 
bringing about so desirable a result. But I must 
say that, knowing him as I did, I had very seri- 
ous doubts. I was w^ell aware of what a little 
pleading might do with him. It was in fact 
possible that one plaintive letter from his wife 
might have brought him back again. Fortu- 
nately it was never written. The woman was 
even then practically mad, and though im- 
mensely difficult to manage by those friends, 
such as Miss Greathead and Miss Kingdon, who 
interested themselves in his affairs and did much 
more for him at critical times than I had been 
able to do, she never, I think, appealed to her 
husband. But it was extraordinary, before he 
went to Italy, to observ^e the waverings of his 
mind. When he was keeping his eldest boy at 
Mirefields, supplying his wife with money for 
the house and living in lodgings at Salcombe, he 
wrote giving a rough account of what he might 
do, or might have to do, and ended up by saying: 
*^Already, lodgings are telling on my nerves. I 
almost think I suffer less even from yells and 



216 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

insults in a house of my own." He even began 
to forget *'the fifth-rate dabblers in the British 
gravy," for v^hich fine phrase T. E. Brown is 
responsible. Maitland ought to have known it 
and did not. It was this perpetual wavering 
and weakness in him which perplexed his 
friends, and would indeed have alienated at last 
very many of them had it not been for the endur- 
ing charm in all his weakness. Nevertheless he 
was now out of England, and those who knew 
him were glad to think it was so. He was, per- 
haps, to have a better time. Nevertheless, even 
so, he wrote to his friend Lake: *^Yes, it is true 
that I am going to glorious scenes, but do not 
forget that I go with much anxiety in my mind 
— anxiety about the little children, the chances 
of life and death, &c., &c. It is not like my 
Italian travel eight years ago, when — save for 
cash — I was independent. I have to make a 
good two hundred a year apart from my own 
living and casual expenses. If I live I think I 
shall do it — but there's no occasion for merri- 
ment." Yet if it was no occasion for mere mer- 
riment it was an occasion for joy. He knew it 
well, and so did those know who understand the 
description that Maitland gave in 'Taternoster 
Row," of the sunset at Athens. It is very won- 
derfully painted, and as he describes it he makes 
Gifford say: "Stop, or I shall clutch you by the 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 217 

throat. I warned you before that I cannot 
stand these reminiscences." And this reminds 
me that when I wrote to him once from Naples, 
he replied: "You fill me with envious gloom." 
But now, when he had finished his pot-boiler of 
Siena, he was going south to Naples, his ''most 
interesting city of the modern world," and after- 
wards farther south to the Calabrian Hills, and 
the old dead world of Magna Graecia. 

As a result of that journey he gave us "Magna 
Graecia." This book of itself is a sufficient 
proof that he was by nature a scholar, an in- 
habitant of the very old world, a discoverer of 
the time of the Renaissance, a Humanist, a pure 
man of letters, and not by nature a writer of 
novels or romances. Although Maitland's 
scholarship was rather wide than deep save in 
one or two lines of investigation, yet his feeling 
for all those matters with which a sympathetic 
scholarship can deal was amazingly deep and 
true. Once in Calabria and the south he made 
and would make great discoveries. In spite of 
his poverty, which comes out so often in the de- 
scription of his conditions upon this journey, he 
loved everything he found there with a strange 
and wonderful and almost pathetic passion. I 
remember on his return how he talked to me of 
the far south, and of his studies in Cassiodorus. 
One incident in "Magna Graecia," which is re- 



218 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

lated somewhat differently from what he him- 
self told me at the time, pleased him most es- 
pecially. It was when he met two men and 
mentioned the name of Cassiodorus, whereupon 
they burst out with amazement, ^^Cassiodoria, 
why we know Cassiodoria!'^ That the name 
should be yet familiar to these live men of the 
south gratified his historic sense amazingly, and 
I can well remember how he threw his head back 
and shook his long hair with joy, and burst into 
one of his most characteristic roars of laughter. 
It was a simple incident, but it brought back the 
past to him. 

Of all his books I think I love best ^^Magna 
Graecia." I always liked it much better than 
^The Meditations of Mark Sumner," and for a 
thousand reasons. For one thing it is a wholly 
true book. In "The Meditations," he falsified, 
in the literary sense, very much that he wrote. 
As I have said, it needs to be read with a com- 
mentary or guide. But "Magna Graecia" is 
pure Maitland; it is absolutely himself. It is, 
indeed, very nearly the Maitland who might 
have been if ill luck had not pursued him from 
his boyhood. Had he been a successful man on 
the lines that fate pointed out to him ; had he suc- 
ceeded greatly — or nobly, as he would have said 
— at the University; had he become a tutor, a 
don, a notable man among men of letters, still 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 219 

would he have travelled in southern Italy, and 
made his great pilgrimage to the Fonte di Cas- 
siodorio. Till he knew south Italy his greatest 
joy had been in books. That he loved books we 
all know. There, of a certainty, ''The Medi- 
tations'' is a true witness. But how much more 
he loved the past and the remains of Greece and 
old, old Italy, "Magna Graecia" proves to us 
almost with tears. 

I have said that Maitland was perhaps not a 
deep scholar, for scholarship nowadays must 
needs be specialised if it is to be deep. He had 
his odd prejudices, and hugged them. The 
hypothesis of Wolf concerning Homer visibly 
annoyed him. He preferred to think of the 
Iliad and the Odyssey as having been written by 
one man. This came out of his love of person- 
ality — the great ones of the past were as gods to 
him. All works of art, or books, or great events 
were wholly theirs, for they made even the world, 
and the world made them not. Though I know 
that he would have loved, in many ways, a book 
such as Gilbert Murray's ''Rise of the Greek 
Epic," yet Murray's fatally decisive analysis of 
the Homeric legend would have pained him 
deeply. On one occasion I remember sending 
to him, partly as some reasonable ground for my 
own scepticism, but more, I think, out of some 
mischievous desire to plague him, a cleverly 



220 HENRY MAITLAND 

written pamphlet by a barrister which threw 
doubts upon the Shakespearean legend. He 
wrote to me; ^'I have read it with great indig- 
nation. Confound the fellow!— he disturbs 
me." But then he was essentially a conservative, 
and he lived in an alien time. 



CHAPTER X 

WHAT he suffered, endured, and en- 
joyed in Magna Graecia and his old 
dead world, those know who have read 
with sympathy and understanding. It was truly 
as if the man, born in exile, had gone home at 
last — so much he loved it, so well he understood 
the old days. And now once more he came back 
to England to a happier life, even though great 
anxieties still weighed him down. Yet with 
some of these anxieties there was joy, for he loved 
his children and thought very much of them, 
hoping and fearing. One of the very first let- 
ters I received from him on his return from Italy 
is dated May 7, 1898, and was written from Hen- 
ley in Arden: ''You have it in your power to 
do me a most important service. Will you on 
every opportunity industriously circulate the 
news that I am going to live henceforth in War- 
wickshire? It is not strictly true, but a very 
great deal depends on my real abode being pro- 
tected from invasion. If you could inspire a 
newspaper paragraph. ... I should think it 

impudent to suppose that newspapers cared 

221 



222 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

about the matter but that they have so often 
chronicled my movements, and if by any chance 
the truth got abroad it would mean endless in- 
convenience and misery to me. You shall hear 
more in detail when I am less be-devilled." All 
this requires little comment. Every one can un- 
derstand how it was with him. 

Later in the year he wrote to me: "My be- 
haviour is bestial, but I am so hard driven that 
it is perhaps excusable. All work impossible 
owing to ceaseless reports of mad behaviour in 
London. That woman was all but given in 
charge the other day for assaulting her landlady 
with a stick. My solicitor is endeavouring to 
get the child out of her hands. I fear its life is 
endangered, but of course the difficulty of 
coming to any sort of arrangement with such a 
person is very great. . . . Indeed I wish we 
could have met before your departure for South 
Africa. My only consolation is the thought that 
something or other decisive is bound to have 
happened before you come back, and then we 
will meet as in the old days, please heaven. 
As for me, my literary career is at an end, and 
the workhouse looms larger day by day. I 
should not care, of course, but for the boys. A 
bad job, a bad job." But better times were per- 
haps coming for him. The child that he refers 
to as still in the hands of his mother was his 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 223 

youngest boy. Much of his life at this time is 
lost to me because much happened while I was 
absent in South Africa, where I spent some 
months in travel. I remember it pleased him 
to get letters from me from far-off places such as 
Buluwayo. He always had the notion that I 
was an extraordinarily capable person, an idea 
which only had some real truth if my practical 
capacities were compared with his strange want 
of them. By now he was not living in War- 
wickshire; indeed, if I remember rightly, on my 
return from Africa I found him at Godalming. 
When I left Cape Town I was very seriously 
ill, and I remained ill for some months after my 
return home. Therefore it was some time till 
we met again. But when we did meet it was at 
Leatherhead, where he was in lodgings, pleased 
to be not very far from George Meredith, who 
indeed, I think, loved him. It was, of course, 
as I have said, through Maitland that I first met 
Meredith. For some reason which I do not 
know, Maitland gave him a volume of mine, 
^The Western Trail," which the old writer was 
much pleased with. Indeed it was in conse- 
quence of his liking for that book that he asked 
me to dine with him just before I went to Africa. 
Maitland was not present at this dinner, he was 
then still in Warwickshire; but Meredith spoke 
very affectionately of him, and said many things 



224 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

not unpleasing about his work. But probably 
Meredith, like myself, thought more of the man 
than he did of his books, which is indeed from 
my point of view a considerable and proper 
tribute to any writer. Sometimes the work of a 
man is greater than himself, and it seems a pity 
when one meets him ; but if a man is greater than 
what he does one may always expect more, and 
some day may get it. It was apropos of Mait- 
land, in some way which I cannot exactly recall, 
that Meredith, who was in great form that night, 
and wonderful in monologue — as he always was, 
more especially after he became so deaf that it 
was hard to make him hear — told us an admira- 
bly characteristic story about two poor school- 
boys. It appeared, said Meredith, that these 
two boys, who came of a clever but poverty- 
stricken house, did very badly at their school 
because they were underfed. As Meredith ex- 
plained this want of food led to a poor circula- 
tion. What blood these poor boys had was re- 
quired for the animal processes of living, and did 
not enable them to carry on the work of the brain 
in the way that it should have done. However, 
it one day happened that during play one of 
these boys was induced to stand upon his head, 
with the result that the blood naturally gravi- 
tated to that unaccustomed quarter. His ideas 
instantly became brilliant — so brilliant, indeed, 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 225 

that a great idea struck him. He resumed his 
feet, rushed home, and communicated his dis- 
covery to his brother, and henceforward they 
conducted their studies standing upon their 
heads, and became brilliant and visibly success- 
ful men. Of course it was a curious thing, 
though not so curious when one reflects on the 
nature of men who are really men of letters, that 
Meredith and Henry Maitland had one thing 
tremendously in common, their love of words. 
In my conversation with Meredith that day I 
mentioned the fact that I had read a certain in- 
terview with him. I asked him whether it con- 
veyed his sentiments with any accuracy. He re- 
plied mournfully: "Yes, yes, — no doubt the 
poor fellow got down more or less what I meant, 
but he used none of my beautiful words, none of 
my beautiful words!" 

It does not seem unnatural to me to say some- 
thing of George Meredith, since he had in many 
ways an influence on Maitland. Certainly when 
it came to the question of beautiful words they 
were on the same ground, if not on the same 
level. I myself have met during my literary 
life, and in some parts of the world where lit- 
erature is little considered, many men who were 
reputed great, and indeed were great, it may be, 
in some special line, yet Meredith was the only 
man I ever knew to whom I would have allowed 



226 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

freely the word ^^great" the moment I met him, 
without any reservation. This I said to Mait- 
land and he smiled, feeling that it was true. I 
remember he wrote to Lake about Meredith, 
saying: ''You ought to read 'Richard Feverel,' 
'Evan Harrington,' 'The Egoist,' and 'Diana of 
the Crossways.' These, in my opinion, are de- 
cidedly his best books, but you won't take up any- 
thing of his without finding strong work." And 
"strong work" with Maitland was very high 
praise indeed. 

By now, when he was once more in Surrey, we 
did not meet so infrequently as had been the case 
after his second marriage and before the sep- 
aration. It is true that his living out of Lon- 
don made a difference. Still I now went down 
sometimes and stayed a day with him. We 
talked once more in something of our old man- 
ner about books and words, the life of men of 
letters, and literary origins or pedigrees, always 
a strong point in him. It was ever a great joy 
to Maitland when he discovered the influence of 
one writer upon another. For instance, it was 
he who pointed out to me first that Balzac was 
the literary parent of Murger, as none indeed 
can deny who have read the chapter in "Illusions 
Perdues" where Lucien Rubempre writes and 
sings the drinking song with tears in his eyes as 
he sits by the bedside of Coralie, his dead mis- 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 227 

tress. This he did, as will be remembered, to 
obtain by the sale of the song sufficient money 
to bury her. From that chapter undoubtedly 
sprang the whole of the ^'Vie de Boheme," 
though to it Murger added much, and not least 
his livelier sense of humour. Again, I well re- 
member how Maitland took down Tennyson — 
ever a joy to him, because Tennyson was a mas- 
ter of words though he had little enough to say 
— and showed me the influence that the "Wis- 
dom of Solomon," in the Apocrypha, had upon 
some of the last verses of ''The Palace of Art." 
No doubt some will not see in a mere epithet or 
two that Solomon's words had any connection 
with the work of the Poet-Laureate, whom I 
nicknamed, somewhat to Maitland's irritation, 
"the bourgeois Chrysostom." Yet I myself have 
no doubt that Maitland was right; but even if 
he were not he would still have taken wonderful 
joy in finding out the words of the two verses 
which run : "Whether it were a whistling wind, 
or a melodious noise of birds among the spread- 
ing branches, or a pleasant fall of water running 
violently, or a terrible sound of stones cast down, 
or a running that could not be seen of skipping 
beasts, or a roaring voice of most savage wild 
beasts, or a rebounding echo from the hollow 
mountains; these things made them swoon for 
fear." Of course he loved all rhythm, and 



228 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

found it sometimes in unexpected places, even in 
unconsidered writers. There was one passage 
he used to quote from Mrs. Ewing, who, indeed, 
was no small writer, which he declared to be 
wonderful, and in its way quite perfect: "He 
sat, patient of each succeeding sunset, until this 
aged world should crumble to its close." Then, 
again, he rejoiced when I discovered, though no 
doubt it had been discovered many times before, 
that his musical Keats owed so much to Fletch- 
er's "Faithful Shepherdess." 

It would be a very difficult question to ask, in 
some examination concerning English literature, 
what book in English by its very nature and 
style appealed most of all to Henry Maitland. 
I think I am not wrong when I say that it was 
undoubtedly Walter Savage Landor's "Imagi- 
nary Conversations." That book possesses to 
the full the two great qualities which most de- 
lighted him. It is redolent of the past, and 
those classic conversations were his chief joy; but 
above and beyond this true and great feeling of 
Landor's for the past classic times there was the 
most eminent quality of Landor's rhythm. I 
have many times heard Maitland read aloud 
from "^sop and Rhodope," and I have even 
more often heard him quote without the book 
the passage which runs: "There are no fields 
of amaranth on this side of the grave; there are 



OF HEXRY MAITLAXD 229 

no voices, O Rhodope, that are not soon mute, 
however tuneful; there is no name, with what- 
ever emphasis of passionate love repeated of 
which the echo is not faint at last." Maitland 
knew, and none knew better, that in a triumphant 
passage there is triumphant rhythm, and in a 
passage full of mourning or melancholy the ac- 
companying and native rhythm is both melan- 
choly and mournful. How many times, too, I 
have heard him quote, again from Landor, 
^'Many flowers must perish ere a grain of corn 
be ripened." 

All this time the wife was I know not where, 
nor did I trouble much to inquire. Miss King- 
don and Miss Greathead looked after her very 
patiently, and did good work for their friend 
Maitland, as he well knew. But although he 
was rejoiced to be alone for a time, or at any rate 
relieved from the violent misery of her presence, 
I came once more to discern, both from things 
he said and from things he wrote to me, that a 
celibate life began again to oppress him gravely. 
Yet it was many months before he at last con- 
fided in me fully, and then I think he only did it 
because he was certain that I was the one friend 
he possessed with whom he could discuss any 
question without danger of moral theories or 
prepossessions interfering with the rightful solu- 
tion. Over and beyond this qualification for his 



230 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

confidence there was the fact that I knew him, 
whereas no one else did. To advise any man it 
is necessary to know the man who is to be advised, 
for wisdom in vacuo or in vitro may be noth- 
ing but foolishness. Others would have said to 
him, "Look back on your experience and reflect. 
Have no more to do with women in any way." 
No doubt it would have been good advice, but it 
would have been impossible for him to act on it. 
Therefore when he at last opened his mind to me 
and told me of certain new prospects which were 
disclosing themselves to him, I was not only 
sympathetic but encouraging. It seems that in 
the year 1898 he first met a young French lady 
of Spanish origin with whom he had previously 
corresponded for some little time. Her name 
was Therese Espinel. She belonged to a very 
good family, perhaps somewhat above the haute 
bourgeoisie, and was a woman of high education 
and extreme Gallic intelligence. As I came to 
know her afterwards I may also say that she was 
a very beautiful woman, and possessed, what I 
know to have been a very great charm to Mait- 
land, as it always was to me, a very sweet and 
harmonious voice — it was perhaps the most 
beautiful human voice for speaking that I have 
ever heard. Years afterwards I took her to see 
George Meredith. He kissed her hand and told 
her she had beautiful eyes. As she was partly 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 231 

Spanish she knew Spanish well. Her German 
was excellent, her English that of an educated 
Englishwoman. It appears that she came across 
Maitland's ^'Paternoster Row," and it occurred 
to her that it should be translated into French. 
She got into correspondence with him about this 
book, and in 1898 came over to England and 
made his acquaintance. It is curious to remem- 
ber that on one other occasion Maitland got into 
correspondence with another French lady, who 
insisted emphatically that he was the one person 
whom she could trust to direct her aright in life 
— a notion at the time not a little comical to me, 
and also to the man who was to be this soul's di- 
rector. 

When these two people met and proved 
mutually sympathetic it was not unnatural that 
he should tell her something of his own life, es- 
pecially when one knows that so much of their 
earlier talks dealt with "Paternoster Row" and 
with its chief character, so essentially Henry 
Maitland. He gave her, indeed, very much of 
his story, yet not all of it, not, indeed, the chief 
part of it, since the greatest event in his life was 
the early disaster which had maimed and dis- 
torted his natural career and development. Yet 
even so much as he told her of his first and sec- 
ond marriage — for he by no means concealed 
from the beginning that he was yet married — 



232 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

very naturally engaged her womanly compassion. 
Adding this to her real and fervent admiration 
of his literary powers, his personality and story 
seem to have inclined her to take an even ten- 
derer interest in him. She was certainly a 
bright and wonderful creature, although not 
without a certain native melancholy, and pos- 
sessed none of those conventional ideas which 
wreck some lives and save others from disaster. 
Therefore I was not much surprised, although 
I had not been told everything that had hap- 
pened, when Maitland wrote to me that he con- 
templated taking a very serious step. It was 
indeed a very serious one, but so natural in the 
circumstances, as I came to hear of them, that I 
myself made no strictures on his scheme. It 
was no other than the proposal that he and this 
new acquaintance of his should cast in their lot 
together and make the world and her relatives 
believe that they were married. No doubt when 
I was consulted I found it in some ways difRcult 
to give a decision. What might be advisable for 
the man might not be so advisable for his pro- 
posed partner. He was making no sacrifice, 
and she was making many. Nevertheless, I 
hold the view that these matters are matters for 
the people concerned and are nobody else's busi- 
ness. The thing to be considered from my point 
of view was whether Maitland would be able to 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 233 

support her, and whether she was the kind of 
woman who would retain her hold upon him and 
give him some peace and happiness towards the 
end of his life. In thinking over these things I 
remembered that the other two women had not 
been ladies. They had not been educated. 
They understood nothing of the world which 
was Maitland's world, and, as I knew, a dis- 
aster was bound to come in both cases. But now 
it appeared to me that there was a possible hope 
for the man, and a hope that such a step might 
almost certainly end in happiness, or at any rate 
in peace. That something of the kind would 
occur I knew, and even if this present affair went 
no farther, yet some other woman would have to 
be dealt with even if she did not come into his 
life for a long while. Therese Espinel was at 
any rate, as I have said, beautiful and accom- 
plished, essentially of the upper classes, and, 
what was no small thing from Maitland's point 
of view, a capable and feeling musician. Of 
such a woman Maitland had had only a few 
weeks' experience many years before. I thought 
the situation promised much, and raised no 
moral objection to the step he proposed to take 
as soon as I saw he was strongly bent in one di- 
rection. For one thing I was sure of, and it was 
that anything whatever which put a definite ob- 
stacle in the way of his returning to his wife was 



234 THE PRIVATE LIFE 



1 



a thing to be encouraged. It was, in fact, ab- 
solutely a duty; and I care not what comments 
may be made upon my attitude or my morals. 

That Maitland would have gone back to his 
wife eventually I have very little doubt, and of 
course nothing but disaster and new rage and 
misery would have come of his doing so. For 
these reasons I did everything in my power to 
help and encourage him in a matter which gave 
him extreme nervousness and anxiety. I know 
he said to me that the step he proposed to take 
early in 1899 grew more and more serious the 
more he thought of it. Again, I think there was 
no overwhelming passion at the back of his 
mind. Yet it was a true and sincere affection, 
of that I am sure. But there were many diffi- 
culties. It appears that the girl's father had 
died a few months before, and as there was some 
money in the family this fact involved certain 
serious difficulties about the future signing of 
names when all the legal questions concerned 
with the little property that there was came to 
be settled. Then he asked me what sort of hope 
was there that this pretended marriage would not 
become known in England. He said: ''I fear 
it certainly would." When I reflect now upon 
the innumerable lies and subterfuges that I my- 
self indulged in with the view of preventing any- 
body knowing of this affair in London, I can 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 235 

see he was perfectly justified in his fears, for 
when the step was at last taken I was continually 
being asked about Maitland's wife. Naturally 
enough, it was said by one set of people that she 
was with him in France; while it was said by 
others, much better informed, that she was still 
in England. I was sometimes requested to set- 
tle this difficult matter, and I did find it so diffi- 
cult that at times I was compelled to state the 
actual truth on condition that what I said was re- 
garded as absolutely confidential. 

He and Therese did, indeed, discuss the possi- 
bility of braving the world with the simple truth, 
but that he knew would have been a very tre- 
mendous step for her. The mother was yet 
living, and she played a strange part in this lit- 
tle drama — a part not so uncommonly played as 
many might think. She became at last her 
daughter's confidante and learned the whole of 
Maitland's story, and although she opposed their 
solution of the trouble to the very best of her 
power, when it became serious she at last gave 
way and consented to any step that her daughter 
wished to take, provided that there was no public 
scandal. 

Of course, many people will regard with hor- 
ror the part that her mother played in this 
drama, imputing much moral blame. There 
are, however, times when current morality has 



286 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

not the value which it is commonly given, and I 
think Madame Espinel acted with great wisdom, 
seeing that nothing she could have pleaded 
would have altered matters. Her daughter was 
no longer a child; she was a grown-up woman, 
not without determination, and entirely without 
religious prejudice, a thing not so uncommon 
with the intellectual Frenchwoman. Certainly 
there are some who will say that a public scandal 
was better than secrecy, and in this I am at one 
with them. Nevertheless there was much to 
consider, for there would certainly have been 
what Henry himself called '^a horrific scandal," 
seeing that the family had many aristocratic rel- 
atives. Maitland, in fact, stated that it would 
be taking an even greater responsibility than he 
was prepared to shoulder if this were done. He 
wrote to me asking for my opinion and counsel, 
especially at the time when there was a vague 
and probably unfounded suggestion that he 
might be able to get a divorce from his wife. It 
appears more than one person wrote to him 
anonymously about her. I am sure he never be- 
lieved what they told him, nor do I. No doubt 
from some points of view I have been very un- 
just to his wife, though I have tried to hold the 
balance true, but I never saw, or heard from 
Maitland, anything to suggest that his wife was 
not all that she should have been in one way, just 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 237 

as she was everything she should not have been 
in another. Seeing that Maitland would have 
given ten years of his life and every penny he 
possessed to secure a divorce, it is certain that he 
absolutely disbelieved what he was told. In 
fact, if he could have got a divorce by consent or 
collusion he would have gladly engaged to pay 
her fifty pounds a year during his life, whatever 
happened and whatever she did. But of course 
this could not be said openly, either by myself or 
by him, and nothing came out of the suggestion, 
whoever made it first. 

I proposed to him one afternoon when I was 
with him that he should make some inquiries as 
to what an American divorce would do for him. 
Whether it were valid or not, it might perhaps 
make things technically easier and enable him to 
marry in France with some show of legality. At 
the moment he paid no attention to what I said, 
or seemed to pay no attention, but it must have 
sunk into his mind, for a few days afterwards he 
wrote to me and said: ''Is it a possible thing to 
get a divorce in some other country as things are? 
— a divorce which would allow of a legal mar- 
riage, say, in that same country. I have vaguely 
heard such stories, especially of Heligoland. 
The German novelist, Sacher Masoch, is said to 
have done it — said so by his first wife, who now 
lives in Paris." Upon receiving this letter of his 



238 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

I wrote and reminded him of what I had said 
about American divorces, and gave him all the 
information that I had in my mind and could col- 
lect at the moment, especially mentioning Dakota 
or Nevada as two States of the United States 
which had the most reasonable and wide-minded 
views of marriage and divorce. For this letter 
he wrote and thanked me heartily, but quoted 
from a letter of Therese which seemed to indi- 
cate, not unclearly, that she preferred him to take 
no steps which might lead to long legal processes. 
They should join their fortunes together, taking 
their chance as to the actual state of affairs being 
discovered afterwards. His great trouble, of 
course, was the absolute necessity of seeming in 
Paris to be legally married, out of regard for her 
relatives. Besides these connections of her fam- 
ily, she knew a very great number of important 
people in Paris and Madrid, and many of them 
should receive by custom the lettres de faire part. 
With some little trouble the financial difficulties 
with regard to the signing of documents were got 
over for the moment by a transfer of investments 
from Therese to her mother. On this being done 
their final determination was soon taken, and they 
determined, after this '^marriage'* was com- 
pleted, to leave Paris and live somewhere in the 
mountains, perhaps in Savoy; and he then wrote 
to me : "You will be the only man in London 



OF HEXRY MAITLAXD 239 

who knows this story. Absolute silence — it goes 
without saying. If ever by a slip of the tongue 
you let a remark fall that my wife w^as dead, tant 
mieux; only no needless approach of the topic. 
A grave, grave responsibility^ mine. She is a 
woman to go through fire for, as you saw. An 
incredible woman to one who has spent his life 
with such creatures. ... I have lately paid a 
bill of one pound for damage done by my wife, 
damage in a London house where she lived till 
turned out by the help of the police. Incredible 
stories about her. She attacked the landlord 
with a stick, and he had seriously to defend him- 
self. Then she tore up shrubs and creepers in 
the garden. No, I have had my time of misery. 
It must come to an end." 

In the first part of this letter which I have just 
quoted he says, ^'She is a woman to go through 
fire for, as you saw." This expression does not 
mean that I had ever met her, but that I had seen 
sufficient of her letters to recognise the essential 
fineness of her character. I urged him once 
more to a rapid decision, and he promised that 
he would let nothing delay it. Nevertheless it 
is perfectly characteristic of him that, having 
now finally decided there should be no attempt 
at any divorce, he proceeded instantly to play 
with the idea again. Xo doubt he was being 
subjected to many influences of different kinds, 



240 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

for I find that he sent me a letter in which he told 
me that it seemed to be ascertained that an 
American divorce and remarriage would satisfy 
French law. If that was so, he would move 
heaven and earth to get all the necessary details 
of the procedure. He had written to a friend in 
Baltimore who knew all about such matters, but 
he implored me to find out if there were not some 
book which gave all possible information about 
the marriage and divorce laws of all the separate 
States of North America. He asked : "Do you 
really think that I can go and present myself for 
a divorce without the knowledge of the other per- 
son? The proceedings must be very astound- 
ing." His knowledge of America was not equal 
to my own, much as I had spoken to him about 
that country. The proceedings in divorce courts 
in some of the United States have long ceased to 
astonish anybody. He told me, however, that he 
had actually heard of American lawyers adver- 
tising for would-be divorcers, and he prayed de- 
voutly that he could get hold of such a man. I 
did my best to rake up for him every possible 
piece of information on the subject, and no doubt 
his friend in Baltimore, of whom I know noth- 
ing, on his part sent him information. It seemed, 
however, that any proceeding would involve 
some difficulties, and on discovering this he in- 
stantly dropped the whole scheme. I find that 



OF HEXRY MAITLAKD 241 

he wrote to me afterwards, saying: ^'It is prob- 
able that I leave England at the end of April. 
Not one syllable abo»t me to any one, of course. 
The step is so bold as to be really impudent, and 
I often have serious fears, not, of course, on my 
own account. You shall hear from abroad. . . . 
If some day one could know^ tranquillity^ and all 
meet together decently." 

After many qualms, hot and cold fits, despond- 
ency, and inspirations of courage, he at last took 
the decisive step. In May he was in Paris, and I 
think it was in that month that the ^'marriage" 
took place. I am singularly ignorant of the de- 
tails, for he seemed to be somewhat reluctant to 
speak of them, and I do not even know whether 
any actual ceremony took place or not, nor am I 
much concerned to know. They were at any rate 
together, and no doubt tolerably happy. He 
wrote me nothing either about this subject or any- 
thing else for some time, and I was content to 
hear nothing. I do know, however, that they 
spent the summer together in Switzerland, mov- 
ing from Trient, near the Col de Balme, to Lo- 
carno, on Lago Maggiore. He wrote to me once 
from the Rhone Valley saying that as a result of 
his new domestic peace and comfort, even though 
it were but the comfort of Swiss hotels, and 
owing also to the air of the mountains, which al- 
ways suited him very well, he was in much better 



242 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

health than he had been for years past. His 
lung, the perpetual subject of his preoccupation, 
appears to have given him little trouble, al- 
though, knowing that its state was attributable 
in some measure to emphysema, he wrote to me 
for detailed explanations of that particular com- 
plaint. During the whole of this time, the only 
honeymoon he had ever had, he was, however, 
obliged to work very hard, for he was in cease- 
less trouble about money. In his own words, he 
had to ^'publish furiously" in order to keep pace 
with his expenses. There was his wife in Eng- 
land, and there were also his children to be par- 
tially provided for. But for the time all went 
well with him. There were fears of all sorts, he 
told me, but they were to be forgotten as much 
as possible. He and Therese returned to Paris 
for the winter. 

During this time, or just about this time, 
which was when the South African War was 
raging, I wrote for a weekly journal, which I 
used to send regularly to Paris with my own con- 
tributions marked in it. This temporary aber- 
ration into journalism so late in my literary life 
interested him much. He wrote to me: ''In 
the old garret days who would have imagined 
the strange present? I suppose you have now a 
very solid footing in journalism as well as in fic- 
tion. Of course it was wise to get it, as it seems 



OF HENRY MAITLAXD 243 

more than probable that the novelists will be 
starved out very soon. With Europe in a state 
of war, which may last for a decennium, there 
will be little chance for story-tellers." Then, in 
spite of his new happiness, his inherited or ac- 
quired pessimism got the worst of him. He 
adds: ^T wish I had died ten years ago. I 
should have gone away with some hope for civi- 
lisation, of which I now have none. One's 
choice seems to be between death in the work- 
house, or by some ruffian's bullet. As for those 
who come after one, it is too black to think 
about." 

No doubt this was only his fun, or partly such. 
There is one phrase in BoswelFs "Johnson" that 
he always loved amazingly; it is w^here Johnson 
declares that some poor creature had "no skill in 
inebriation." Maitland perhaps had no skill in 
inebriation when he drank at the fountain of 
literary pessimism, for indeed when he did drink 
there his views were fantastic and preposterous. 
As a matter of fact he was doing very well, in 
spite of the workhouse in Marylebone Road, 
from which he was now far enough. There 
might be little chance for story-tellers, yet his 
financial position, for the first time in his life, 
was tolerably sound. One publisher even gave 
him three hundred pounds on account for a book 
which I think was "The Best of all Things." 



244 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

For this book he also received five hundred dol- 
lars from America; so, for him, or indeed for 
almost any writer, he w2ls very vv^ell paid. Little 
as the public may believe it, a sum of three hun- 
dred pounds on account of royalties is as much as 
any well-known man gets — unless by some chance 
he happens to be one of the half-dozen amaz- 
ingly successful writers in the country, and they 
are by no means the best. It has been at my ear- 
nest solicitation that he had at last employed an 
agent, though, with his peculiar readiness to re- 
ceive certain impressions, he had not gone to one 
I recommended, but to another, suddenly men- 
tioned to him when he was just in the mood to 
act as I suggested. This agent worked for him 
very well, and Maitland was now getting five 
guineas a thousand words for stories, which is 
also a very good price for a man who does really 
good work. It is true that very bad work is not 
often well paid, but the very best work of all is 
often not to be sold at any price. About this time 
I obtained for him a very good ofifer for a book, 
and he wrote to me: "It is good to know that 
people care to make offers for my work. What 
I aim at is to get a couple of thousand pounds 
safely invested for my two boys. Probably I 
shall not succeed — and if I get the money, what 
security have I that it will be safe in a year or 
two? As likely as not the Bank of England will 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 245 

lie in ruins." After all, I must confess that he 
was skilful in the inebriation of his pessimism, 
for to me these phrases are delightful, in spite of 
the half-belief with which they were uttered. 

During the last winter of 1900 he wrote to me 
from Paris that he proposed to be in London for 
a few days in the spring of 1901, but much de- 
pended on the relation, which seemed to him 
highly speculative, between the money he re- 
ceived and the money he was obliged to spend. 
Apparently he found Paris anything but cheap. 
According to his own account, he was therefore 
in perpetual straits, in spite of the good prices he 
now obtained for his work. He added in this 
letter: '^I hope to speak with you once more, 
before we are both shot or starved." This pro- 
posal to come across the Channel in the spring 
ended in smoke. He was not able to afford it, or 
was reluctant to move, or more likely reluctant 
to expose himself to any of the troubles still wait- 
ing for him in England. So long as his good 
friends who were looking after his wife, and 
more or less looking after his children, could do 
their work and save him from anxiety, he was not 
likely to wish his peace disturbed by any discus- 
sions on the subject. When he had decided not 
to come he sent me a letter in which one of the 
paragraphs reads: ^'I am still trying to believe 
that there is a King of England, and cannot take 



246 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

to the idea, any more than to the moral and ma- 
terial ruin which seems to be coming upon the 
old country. Isn't it astounding that we have 
the courage to write books? We shall do so, I 
suppose, until the day when publishers find their 
business at an end. I fear it may not be far off." 
At this moment, being more or less at peace, and 
working with no peculiar difficulty, he declared 
himself in tolerable health, although he affirmed 
he coughed a great deal. It seemed to me that 
he did not think so much about his health as he 
had done before and was to do later, and he dis- 
played something like his old real nature with 
regard to literary enterprise. It was just about 
this time that he reminded me of his cherished 
project for a story of the sixth century A.D. This, 
of course, was the book published after his death, 
''Basil." He had then begun to work upon it, 
and said he hoped to finish it that summer. This 
cheered him up wonderfully, and he ended one 
letter to me with: ''Well, well, let us be glad 
that again we exchange letters with address other 
than that of workhouse or hospital. It is a great 
demand, this, to keep sane and solvent — I dare 
hope for nothing more." Occasionally in his 
letters there seemed to me to be slight indications 
that he was perhaps not quite so happy as he 
wished to be. 

During that summer my wife and I were in 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 247 

Switzerland, and he wrote to me, while we were 
on the Lake of Geneva, from Vernet-les-Bains in 
the Eastern Pyrenees. By this time Therese and 
I, although we had never met, were accustomed 
to send messages to each other. It was a comfort 
to me to feel that he was with some one of whom 
I could think pleasantly, and whom I much 
wished to know. We had, indeed, proposed to 
meet somewhere on the Continent, but that fell 
through, partly because we were obliged to re- 
turn to England earlier than we had proposed. 
Nevertheless, although we did not meet, and 
though I had some fears for him, I was tolerably 
happy about him and his affairs, and certainly 
did not anticipate the new crisis which was ap- 
proaching, nor the form it would take. 



CHAPTER XI 

IT was Maitland's custom to rely for advice 
and assistance on particular people at cer- 
tain crises. In some cases he now appealed 
to Rivers ; in very many he appealed to me ; but 
when his health was particularly involved it was 
his custom to relapse desperately on his friend 
Dr. Lake. He even came to Lake on his return 
from Magna Graecia when he had taken Pots- 
dam on his way home to England. He had gone 
there at Schmidt's strong invitation and par- 
ticular desire that he should taste for once a real 
Westphalian ham. It is a peculiarly savage and 
not wholly safe custom of Germans to eat such 
hams uncooked, and Maitland, having fallen in 
with this custom, though he escaped trichinosis, 
procured for himself a peculiarly severe attack of 
indigestion. He came over from Folkestone to 
Lake in order to get cured. The ham apparently 
had not given him the lasting satisfaction which 
he usually got out of fine fat feeding. As I have 
said, Lake and Maitland had been friends from 
the time that Maitland's father bought his chem- 
ist's business from the Doctor's father. For they 

248 



HENRY MAITLAND 249 

had been schoolfellows together at Hinkson's 
school in Mirefields. Nevertheless it was only 
in 1894 th^t ^hey renewed their old acquaintance. 
Dr. Lake saw him once at Ewell, soon after a 
local practitioner had frightened Maitland very 
seriously by diagnosing phthisis and giving a 
gloomy prognosis. On that occasion Lake went 
over Maitland's chest and found very little 
wrong. Technically speaking, there was per- 
haps a slight want of expansion at the apex of 
each lung, and apparently some emphysema at 
the base of the left one, but certainly no active 
tubercular mischief. 

I speak of these things more or less in detail 
because health played so great a part in the 
drama of his life ; as, indeed, it does in most lives. 
It is not the casual thing that novelists mostly 
make of it. It is a perpetually acting cause. 
Steady ill-health, even more than actually acute 
disease, is what helps to bring about most trage- 
dies. When Lake made his diagnosis, with 
which I agree, though there is something else I 
must presently add to it, he took him to London, 
that he might see a notable physician, in order to 
reassure Maitland's mind thoroughly. They 
went together to Dr. Prior Smithson. I have 
never noted that it was Maitland who introduced 
Dr. Lake to Rivers. When Lake had arranged 
this London visit Maitland wrote to Rivers say- 



250 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

ing: ^^I am coming up to town to see a scoun- 
drel specialist in diseases of the lung, who is as 
likely as not to upset all my plans of life. But 
don't be afraid of my company; you shall have 
no pathology. There will be with me an old 
schoolfellow of mine, a country surgeon, in 
whose house I am staying at present. He would 
think it very delightful to meet you." They did 
meet upon that occasion, when Dr. Smithson con- 
firmed Lake's diagnosis and temporarily did a 
great deal to reassure Maitland. From my own 
medical knowledge and my general study of 
Maitland, combined with what some of his doc- 
tors have told me, I have come to the conclusion 
that he did suffer from pulmonary tuberculosis, 
but that it was practically arrested at an early 
stage. However, even arrested tuberculosis in 
many cases leaves a very poor state of nutrition. 
That his joy in food remained with him, though 
with a few lapses, points strongly to the conclu- 
sion that at this time tuberculosis was certainly 
not very active in him. He always needed much 
food, and food, especially, which he liked and 
desired. To want it was a tragedy, as I shall 
show presently. 

In 1897 when he went down to Salcombe he 
reported to Lake a great improvement in health, 
saying that his cough was practically gone, and 
that of course the wonderful weather accounted 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 251 

for it. He ate heartily, and even walked five 
miles a day without fatigue. He added : "The 
only difficulty is breathing through the nose. 
The other day a traction engine passed me on the 
road, and the men upon it looked about them 
wondering where the strange noises came from. 
It was my snoring! All the nasal cavities are 
excoriated ! But I shall get used to this. I have 
a suspicion that it is not the lung that accounts for 
this difficulty, for it has been the same ever since 
I can remember." By this he probably meant 
merely that it had lasted a long time. There was 
a specific reason for it. From Salcombe he re- 
ported to Lake that he had recovered a great 
deal of weight, but that for some time his wheez- 
ing had been worse than ever when the weather 
got very bad. He wrote : "Then again a prac- 
tical paradox that frenzies one, for sleep came 
when bad weather prevented me from being so 
much out of doors!" All this he did not under- 
stand, but it is highly probable that at that time 
he had a little actual tubercular mischief, and a 
slight rise of temperature. As frequently hap- 
pens, enforced rest in the house did for him what 
nothing else could do. But his health certainly 
was something of a puzzle. In 1898, when he 
was in Paris with Therese, he saw a Dr. Piffard, 
apparently not a lung specialist, but, as I am told, 
a physician of high standing. This doctor spoke 



252 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

rather gravely to him, and of course told him 
that he was working much too hard, for he was 
still keeping up his ridiculous habit of writing 
eight hours a day. He said that there was a 
moist spot in the right lung, with a little chronic 
bronchitis, and that the emphysema was very 
obvious. He had, too, some chronic rheuma- 
tism, and also on the right side of his forehead 
what Maitland described as a patch of psoriasis. 
Psoriasis, however, is not as a rule unilateral, 
and it was due to something else. This patch 
had been there for about a year, and was slowly 
getting worse. Dr. Piffard prescribed touching 
him under the right clavicle with the actual cau- 
tery, and for the skin gave him some subcutan- 
eous injections of an arsenical preparation. He 
fed him with eggs, milk, and cod-liver oil, order- 
ing much sleep and absolute rest. During this 
treatment he improved somewhat, and owned 
that he was really better. The cough had be- 
come trifling, his breath was easier and his sleep 
very good. His strength had much increased. 
He also declared that he saw a slight amelio- 
ration in the patch of so-called psoriasis. The 
truth is, I think, that nearly all this improvement 
was due to making him rest and eat. No doubt 
very much of his ill-health was the result of his 
abnormal habits, although there was something 
else at the back of it. For one thing he had 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 253 

rarely taken sufficient exercise, the exercise neces- 
sary for his really fine physique. As I have said, 
he never played a game in his life after he left 
Hinkson's school in Mirefields. Cricket he 
knew not. Football was a mystery to him, and 
a brutal mystery at that. It is true that occasion- 
ally he rowed in a boat at the seaside, for he did 
so at Salcombe when his eldest boy was there 
with him, but any kind of game or sport he ac- 
tually loathed. It was a surprise to me to find 
out that Rivers, while he was at Folkestone, ac- 
tually persuaded him to take to a bicycle. He 
even learned to like it. Rivers told Lake that 
he rode not badly, and with great dignity; and as 
Rivers rode beside him he heard him murmur: 
"Marvellous proceedings! Was the like ever 
seen?" 

However, the time was now coming when he 
was to appeal to Lake once more. In 1901 he 
had proposed to come over to England and see 
me, but he said that the doctor in Paris had for- 
bidden him to go north, rather indicating the 
south for him. He wrote to me : '^Now I must 
go to the centre of France — I don't think the 
Alps are possible — and vegetate among things 
which serve only to remind me that here is not 
England. Then, again, I had thought night 
and day of an English potato, of a slice of Eng- 
lish meat, of tarts and puddings, and of teacakes. 



254 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

Night and day had I looked forward to ravening 
on these things. Well, well!" But he did at 
last come back to England for some time. 

There is no doubt that the feeding in his 
French home was not fat, or fine, or confused 
feeding. Probably the notion of a Scotch hag- 
gis would give any French cook a fit of apoplexy. 
Just before he did come over from Paris, Lake 
had a letter from him which was much like the 
one he wrote to me : ^'Best wishes for the merry, 
merry time, — if merriment can be in the evil 
England of these days. I wish I could look in 
upon you at Christmas. I should roar with joy 
at an honest bit of English roast beef. Could 
you post a slice in a letter? — with gravy?" Lake 
said to his wife when he received this letter: 
^ Why, this is written by a starving man !" Nat- 
urally enough, although I heard from him com- 
paratively seldom, I had always been aware of 
these hankerings of his for England and English 
food. He did not take kindly to exile, or to the 
culinary methods of a careful French interior. 
Truly as he loved the Latin countries, there was 
much in their customs which troubled him 
greatly, and the food was his especial trouble 
when he was not being fed in Italy with oil and 
Chianti. I find occasional melancholy letters of 
his upon the subject, when he indulged in dithy- 
rambs about the fine abundance of feeding in 



OF HEXRY MAITLAXD 255 

England — eggs and bacon and beer. There was 
no doubt he was not living in the way he should 
have lived. At any rate, it was about this time 
— although I did not know it, as I was either in 
the North of England or abroad, I forget which 
— that he came once more to Lake, and was found 
standing on his doorstep tolerably early in the 
morning. According to the doctor, on his ar- 
rival from Paris he was in the condition of a 
star\'ed man. The proof of this is ven.' simple. 
At that time, and for long after, Rivers was liv- 
ing at Folkestone, and as Lake's house was at 
that time full he was unable to entertain Mait- 
land for long, and it was proposed that he should 
go over for a time and stay at Folkestone. When 
Lake examined Maitland he was practically no 
more than a skeleton, but after one week in 
Rivers- house he had picked up no less than 
seven pounds weight. There were then no phys- 
ical signs of active mischief in the lungs except 
the remaining and practically incurable patch of 
emphysema. Although this sudden increase of 
weight does not entirely exclude tuberculosis, it 
is yet rather uncommon for so rapid an increase 
to take place in such cases, and it rather puts 
tuberculosis out of court as being in any way the 
real cause of much of his ill-health. Xow of all 
this I knew ver}- little, or next door to nothing, 
until afterwards. Although I was aware that 



256 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

he was uneasy about many things, I had not 
gathered that there was anything seriously wrong 
with him except his strong and almost irresistible 
desire to return to England. I now know that 
his reticence in speaking to me was due to his 
utter inability to confess that his third venture 
had almost come to disaster over the mere matter 
of the dining-table. I knew so much of the past 
that he feared to tell me of the present, though I 
do not think he could have imagined that I 
should say anything to make him feel that he had 
once again been a sad fool for not insisting good- 
humouredly on having the food he wanted. But 
he was ashamed to speak to me of his difficulties, 
fearing, perhaps, that I might not understand, or 
understand too well. 

Now he and Therese lived together with Ma- 
dame Espinel. The old lady, a very admirable 
and delicate creature of an aristocratic type, was 
no longer young, and was typically French. She 
was in a poor state of health, and lived, like Cor- 
naro, on next to nothing. Her views on food 
were what Maitland would have described as 
highly exiguous. She stood bravely by the 
French breakfast, a thing Maitland could endure 
with comfort for no more than a week or two at 
a time. Her notions as to the midday meal and 
dinner were not characterised by that early Eng- 
lish abundance which he so ardently desired. 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 25T 

After a long period of subdued friction on the 
subject it appears that his endurance of what he 
called prolonged starvation actually broke down. 
He demanded something for breakfast, some- 
thing fat, something in the nature of bacon. 
How this was procured I do not know; I pre- 
sume that bacon can be bought in Paris, though 
I do not remember having ever seen it there ; per- 
haps it was imported from England for his 
especial benefit. However pleasing for the mo- 
ment the result may have been to him from the 
gastronomic point of view, it led Madame Es- 
pinel to make as he alleged, uncalled-for and 
bitter remarks upon the English grossness of his 
tastes. As he was certainly run down and much 
underfed, his nerves were starved too, and he got 
into one of his sudden rages and practically ran 
away from France. I hinted, or said, not long 
ago that he was in a way an intellectual coward 
because he would never entertain any question 
as to the nature of the universe, or of our human 
existence in it. Things were to be taken as they 
stood, and not examined, for fear of pain or men- 
tal disturbance. It was a little later than this 
that Rivers said acutely to Lake: "Why, the 
man is a moral coward. He stands things up to 
a certain point and then runs away." So now he 
ran away from French feeding to Lake's door- 
step, and Lake, as I have said, sent him to Rivers 



258 THE PRIVATE LIFE 



1 



with the very best results, for Mrs. Rivers took a 
great interest in him, looking on him no doubt 
as a kind of foolish child of genius, and fed him, 
by Lake's direction, for all that she was worth. 
As soon as he was in anything like condition, or 
getting on towards it, he was unable to remain 
any longer at Folkestone and proposed to return 
once more to France. This, however, the doctor 
forbade, and thinking that a prolonged course of 
feeding and rest was the one thing he required, 
induced him to go to a sanatorium in the east of 
England. At this time Lake had practically no 
belief whatever in the man being tuberculous, 
but he used Maitland's firm conviction that he 
was in that condition to induce him to enter this 
establishment. It was perhaps the best thing 
which could be done for him. He was looked 
after very well, and the doctor at the sanatorium 
agreed with Lake in finding no evidence of active 
pulmonary trouble. 

As I have said, Maitland kept much, or most, 
of this from me — it was very natural. He wrote 
to me from the sanatorium very many letters, 
from which I shall not quote, as they were after 
all only the natural moans of a solitary invalid. 
But he forbade me to come to him, and I did not 
insist on making the visit which I proposed. I 
was quite aware, if it were only by instinct and 
intuition, that he had no desire for me to discover 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 259 

exactly how things had been going with him in 
France. Nevertheless I did understand vaguely, 
though it was not till afterwards that I dis- 
covered there had been a suggestion made that 
he should not return there, or, indeed, go back to 
the circumstances which had proved so nearly 
disastrous. I do not think that this suggestion 
was ever made personally to him, although I un- 
derstand it was discussed by some of his friends. 
It appears that a year or so afterwards when he 
was talking to Miss Kingdon, she told him that 
it had been thought possible that he might not 
return to France. This he received with much 
amazement and indignation, for certainly he did 
go back, and henceforth I believe the manage- 
ment of the kitchen was conducted on more 
reasonable lines. Certainly he recovered his 
normal weight, and soon after his return was 
actually twelve stone. As a matter of fact, even 
before he left the sanatorium, he protested that 
he was actually getting obese. 

He was perfectly conscious after these experi- 
ences at Folkestone, and the east of England, that 
he owed very much both to Lake and Rivers. In 
fact he wrote to the doctor afterwards, saying 
that he and Rivers had picked him out of a very 
swampy place. He had always a great admi- 
ration for Rivers as a writer, and used to marvel 
wonderfully at his success. It seemed an extraor- 



260 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

dinary thing to Maitland that a man could do 
good work and succeed by it in England. 

It was in 1902 that Maitland and Therese took 
up their abode in St. Pee d'Ascain, under the 
shadow of the Pyrenees. From there he wrote 
me very frequently, and seemed to be doing a 
great deal of work. He liked the place, and, as 
there was an English colony in the town, had 
made not a few friends or acquaintances. By 
now it was a very long time since I had seen him, 
for we had not met during the time of his illness 
in England; and as I had been very much over- 
worked, it occurred to me that three or four 
days at sea, might do something for me, and that 
I could combine this with a visit to my old friend. 
I did not, however, write to him that I was com- 
ing. Knowing his ways and his peculiar nerv- 
ousness, which at this time most visibly grew 
upon him, I thought it best to say nothing until 
I actually came to Bordeaux. When I reached 
the city on the Gironde I put up at a hotel and 
telegraphed to know whether he could receive 
me. The answer I got was one word only, 
^^Venez," and I went down by the early train, 
through the melancholy Landes, and came at last 
to St. Pee by the way of Bayonne. He met me 
at the station — which, by the way, has one of the 
most beautiful views I know — and I found him 
looking almost exactly as he had looked before, 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 261 

save that he wore his hair for the time a little 
differently from his custom in order to hide a 
fading scar upon his forehead, the result of that 
mysterious skin trouble. We were, I know, 
very glad to meet. 

I stayed at a little hotel by myself as he could 
not put me up, but went later to his house. It 
was now that I at last met Therese. As I have 
said, she was a very beautiful woman, tall and 
slender, of a pale, but clear complexion, very 
melancholy lovely eyes, and a voice that was 
absolute music. I could not help thinking that 
he had at last come home, for at that time my 
knowledge of their little domestic difficulties 
owing to the warring customs of their different 
countries was very vague, and she impressed me 
greatly. And yet I knew before I left that night 
that all was not well with Maitland, though it 
seemed so well with him. He complained to 
me when we were alone about his health, and 
even then protested somewhat forcibly against 
the meals. The house itself, or their apartment, 
was — from the foreign point of view — quite 
comfortable, but it did not suggest the kind of 
surroundings which I knew Maitland loved. 
There is, save in the best, a certain air of cold 
barrenness about so many foreign houses. The 
absence of rugs or carpets and curtains, the pol- 
ish and exiguity of the furniture, the general air 



262 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

of having no more in the rooms than that which 
will just serve the purposes of life did not suit 
his sense of abundance and luxury. 

Blake has said, though I doubt if I quote with 
accuracy: ^We do not know that we have 
enough until we have had too much,'' and this is 
a saying of wisdom as well concerning the things 
of the mind as those of the body. He had had 
at last a little too much domesticity, and, be- 
sides that, his desires were set towards London 
and the British Museum, with possibly half the 
year spent in Devonshire. He yearned to get 
away from the little polished French home he 
had made for himself and take Therese back to 
England with him. But this was impossible, 
for her mother still lived with them and naturally 
would not consent to expatriate herself at her 
age from her beloved France. It had been 
truly no little sacrifice for her, a very gentle and 
delicate woman even then suffering from car- 
diac trouble, to leave Paris and its neighbour- 
hood and stay with her child nigh upon the 
frontier of Spain, almost beyond the borders of 
French civilisation. 

I stayed barely a week in St. Pee d'Ascain, 
but during that time we talked much both of his 
work and of mine. Once more his romance of 
the sixth century was in his mind and on his 
desk, though he worked more, perhaps, at nee- 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 263 

essary pot-boilers than at this long pondered 
task. Although he did not write so much as of 
old I found it almost impossible to get him to go 
out with me, save now and again for half an 
hour in the warmest and quietest part of the day. 
He had developed a great fear of death, and life 
seemed to him extraordinarily fragile. Such a 
feeling is ever the greatest warning to those who 
know, and yet I think if he had been rather more 
courageous and had faced the weather a little 
more, it might have been better for him. Dur- 
ing these few days I became very friendly with 
Madame Espinel and her daughter, but more 
especially with the latter, because she spoke 
English, and my French has never been very 
fluent. It requires at least a month's painful 
practice for me to become more or less intelli- 
gible to those who speak it by nature. As I 
went away he gave me a copy of his new book 
"The Meditations of Mark Sumner." It is one 
of those odd things which occur so frequently in 
literary life that I myself had in a way given to 
him the notion of this book. It was not that I 
suggested that he should write it, indeed I had 
developed the idea of such a book to him upon 
my own account, for I proposed at that time 
to write a short life of an imaginary man of let- 
ters to whom I meant to attribute what I after- 
wards published in "Apteryx." Perhaps this 



264 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

seed had lain dormant in Maitland's mind for 
years, and when he at last wrote the book he had 
wholly forgotten that it was I who first sug- 
gested the idea. Certainly no two books could 
have been more different, although my own plan 
was originally much more like his. In the same 
way I now believe that my story "The Purifica- 
tion'' owed its inception without my being aware 
of it to the suppressed passage in "Outside the 
Pale" of which I spoke some time ago. This 
passage I never read; but, when Maitland told 
me of it, it struck me greatly and remained in 
my mind. These influences are one of the great 
uses of literary companionship among men of 
letters. As Henry Maitland used to say: 
"We come together and strike out sparks." 

As I went north by train from St. Pee dAscain 
to Bordeaux, passing ancient Dax and all the 
sombre silences of the wounded serried rows of 
pines which have made an infertile soil yield 
something to commerce, Maitland's spirit, his 
wounded and often sickly spirit, was with me. 
I say "sickly" with a certain reluctance, and 
yet that is what I felt, for I know I read "The 
Meditations" with great revolt in spite of its 
obvious beauty and literary sincerity. Life, as 
I know well, is hard and bitter enough to break 
any man's spirit, and I knew that Maitland had 
been through a fire that not many men had 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 265 

known, yet as I read I thought, and still think, 
that in this book he showed an undue failure of 
courage. If he had been through so many 
disasters yet there was still much left for him, 
or should have been. He had not suffered the 
greatest disaster of all, for since the death of his 
father in his early youth he had lost none that 
he loved. The calculated dispirited air of the 
book afflicted me, and yet, naturally enough, I 
found it wonderfully interesting; for here was 
so much of my lifelong friend, even though now 
and again there are little lapses in sincerity when 
he put another face on things, and pretended, 
even to himself, that he had felt in one way and 
not in another. There is in it only a brief men- 
tion of myself, when he refers to the one solitary 
friend he possessed in London through so many 
years which were only not barren to him in the 
acquisition of knowledge. 

But even as I read in the falling night I came 
to the passage in which he speaks of the Anabasis. 
It is curious to think of, but I doubt if he had 
ever heard that modern scholarship refuses to 
believe it was Xenophon who wrote this book. 
Most assuredly had he heard it he would have 
rejected so revolutionary a notion with rage and 
indignation, for to him Xenophon and the Ana- 
basis were one. In speaking of the march of 
the Greeks he quotes the passage where they re- 



266 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

warded and dismissed the guide who had led 
them through very dangerous country. The 
text says : ''when evening came he took leave of 
us, and went his way by night." On reaching 
Bordeaux I surprised and troubled the telegraph 
clerk at the railway station by telegraphing to 
Henry Maitland those words in the original 
Greek, though naturally I had to write them in 
common script. Often-times I had been his 
guide but had never led him in safety. 

When I reached England again I wrote him 
a very long letter about "The Meditations," and 
in answer received one which I may here quote : 
"My dear old boy, it is right and good that the 
first word about 'Mark Sumner' should come 
from you. I am delighted that you find it read- 
able. For a good ten years I had this book in 
mind vaguely, and for two years have been get- 
ting it into shape. You will find that there is 
not very much reminiscence; more philosophis- 
ing. Why, of course, the solitary friend is you. 
Good old Schmidt is mentioned later. But the 
thing is a curious blend, of course, of truth and 
fiction. Why, it's just because the world is 'in- 
explicable' that I feel my interest in it and its 
future grows less and less. I am a little op- 
pressed by 'the burden of the mystery'; not sel- 
dom I think with deep content of the time when 
speculation will be at an end. But my delight 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 267 

in the beauty of the visible world, and my enjoy- 
ment of the great things of literature, grow 
stronger. My one desire now is to utter this 
passion — yet the result of one's attempt is rather 
a poor culmination for Life." 

During this year, and indeed during the 
greater part of 1902, I was myself very ill and 
much troubled, though I worked exceedingly 
hard upon my longest book, ''Rachel." In con- 
sequence of all I went through during the year 
I wrote to him very seldom until the beginning 
of the following spring I was able to send him 
the book. For a long time after discovering the 
almost impossibility of making more than a mere 
living out of fiction, I had in a sense given up 
writing for the public, as every man is more or 
less bound to do at last if he be not gratified with 
commercial success. Indeed for many years I 
wrote for some three people: for my wife; for 
Rawson, the naturalist, my almost lifelong 
friend; and for Maitland, the only man I had 
known longer than Rawson. Provided they ap- 
proved, and were a little enthusiastic, I thought 
all was well, even though I could earn no more 
than a mere living. And yet I was conscious 
through all these working years that I had never 
actually conquered Maitland's utmost approval. 
For I knew what his enthusiasm was when he was 
really roused; how obvious, how sincere, and 



268 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

how tremendous. When I reflect that I did at 
last conquer it just before he died I have a cer- 
tain melancholy pleasure in thinking of that 
book of mine, which indeed in many ways means 
very much to me, much more than I can put 
down, or would put down for any one now liv- 
ing. Were this book which I am now doing a 
life of myself rather than a sketch of him, I 
should certainly put in the letter, knowing that 
I should be forgiven for inserting it because it 
was a letter of Maitland's. It was, indeed, a 
highly characteristic epistle, for when he praised 
he praised indeed, and his words carried convic- 
tion to me, ever somewhat sceptical of most men's 
approval. He did even more than write to me, 
for I learnt that he spoke about this book to other 
friends of his, especially, as I know, to Edmund 
Roden ; and also to George Meredith, who talked 
to me about it with obvious satisfaction when I 
next met him. Nothing pleased Maitland bet- 
ter than that any one he loved should do good 
work. If ever a man lived who was free from 
the prevalent vices of artistic and literary jeal- 
ousy, it was Maitland. 

But now his time was drawing to an end. He 
and Therese and Madame Espinel left St. Pee 
d'Ascain in June 1903 and went thirty miles 
further into the Pyrenees. He wrote to me a 
few days after reaching the little mountain town 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 269 

of St. Christophe. The change apparently did 
him good. He declared that he had now no 
more sciatica, of which disease, by the way, I had 
not previously heard, and he admitted that his 
general health was improving. St. Christophe 
is very picturesquely situated, and Maitland 
loved it not the less for its associations in ancient 
legend, since it is not very far from the Port or 
Col de Roncesvalles, where the legendary Ro- 
land was slain fighting in the rearguard to pro- 
tect Charlemagne's army. He and Therese went 
once further down the valley and stayed a night 
at Roncesvalles. If any man's live imagination 
heard the horn of Roland blow I think it should 
be Maitland. And yet though he took a great 
pleasure in this country of his, it was not Eng- 
land, nor had he all things at his command which 
he desired. I find that he now greatly missed 
the British Museum, which readers of ^'The 
Meditations" will know he much frequented in 
those old days. For he was once more hard at 
work upon "Basil," and wrote to me that he was 
greatly in want of exact knowledge as to the pro- 
cedure in the execution of wills under the later 
Roman Empire. This was a request for infor- 
mation, and such requests I not infrequently re- 
ceived, always doing my best to tell him what I 
could discover, or to give him the names of au- 
thorities not known to himself. He frequently 



270 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

referred to me about points of difficulty, even 
when he was in England but away from London. 
At that time, naturally enough, I knew nothing 
whatever about wills under the Roman Empire, 
but in less than a week after he had written to 
me I think it highly probable that I knew more 
than any lawyer in London who was not actually 
lecturing on the subject to some pupils. I sent 
him a long screed on the matter. Before this 
reached him I got another letter giving me more 
details of what he required, and since this is cer- 
tainly of some interest as showing his literary 
methods and conscientiousness I think it may be 
quoted. He says: 'And now, hearty thanks 
for troubling about the legal question. The 
time with which I am concerned is about A.D. 540. 
I know, of course, that degeneration and the 
Gothic War made semi-chaos of Roman civilisa- 
tion ; but as a matter of fact the Roman law still 
existed. The Goths never interfered with it, and 
portions even have been handed down. Now 
the testator is a senator. He has one child only, 
a daughter, and to her leaves most of his estate. 
There are legacies to two nephews, and to a sis- 
ter. A very simple will, you see — no difficulty 
about it. But he dying, all the legatees being 
with him at the time, how, as a matter of fact, 
were things settled? Was an executor ap- 
pointed? Might an executor be a legatee? 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 271 

Probate, I think, as you say, there was none, but 
who inherited? Still fantastic things were done 
in those times, but what would the law have 
dictated? Funny, too, that this is the only real 
difficulty which bothers me in the course of my 
story. As regards all else that enters into the 
book I believe I know as much as one can with- 
out being a Mommsen. The senator owns prop- 
erty in Rome and elsewhere. I rather suppose 
it was a case of taking possession if you could, 
and holding if no one interfered with you. 
Wills of this date were frequently set aside on the 
mere assertion of a powerful senator that the 
testator had verbally expressed a wish to benefit 
him. ... It is a glorious age for the romancer." 
As a full answer to this letter I borrowed and sent 
to him Saunders' ^J^^tinian," and received typ- 
ically exaggerated thanks. 



CHAPTER XII 

NOW again he and 1 were but correspond- 
ents, and I do not think that in those 
days when I had so much to do, and had 
also very bad health, I was a very good cor- 
respondent. Maitland, although he sometimes 
apologised humorously, or even nervously, for 
writing at great length, was an admirable letter 
writer. He practised a lost art. Sometimes he 
put into his letters very valuable sketches of peo- 
ple. He did so both to me and to Rivers, and to 
others, and frequently made sharply etched por- 
traits of people whom he knew at St Pee. He 
had a curious habit of nicknaming everybody. 
These nicknames were perhaps not the highest 
form of art, nor were they even always humorous, 
still it was a practice of his. He had a peculiarly 
verbal humor in these matters. Never by any 
chance, unless he was exceedingly serious, did he 
call any man by his actual name. Rawson, my 
most particular friend, whom he knew well, and 
whose books he admired very much for their 
style, was always known as ^'The Rawsonian," 
and I myself was referred to by a similarly 

272 



HENRY MAITLAND 273 

formed name. These are matters of no particu- 
lar importance, but still they show the man in his 
familiar moods and therefore have a kind of 
value — as if one were to show a score of photo- 
graphs or sketches that were serious and then 
insert one where the wise man plays the child, or 
even the fool. There was not a person of any 
importance in St. Pee d'Ascain, although nobody 
knew it, who did not rejoice in some absurd nick- 
name. 

However he went further than mere nick- 
names, and there is in one letter of his to Rivers 
a very admirable sketch of a certain personage : 
"one of the most cantankerous men I ever came 
across; fierce against the modern tendencies of 
science, especially in England ; an anti-Darwinite 
&c. He rages agaiiist Huxley, accusing him of 
having used his position for personal vanity and 
gain, and of ruining the scientific and industrial 
prospects of England; charges of the paltriest 
dishonesty against H. and other such men abound 
in his conversation. X., it seems, was one of the 
original students of the Jermyn Street School of 
Mines, and his root grievance is the transforma- 
tion of that establishment — brought about, he de- 
clares, for the personal profit of Huxley and of 
— the clerks of the War Office ! You, he regards 
as a most valuable demonstration of the evils re- 
sulting from the last half-century of ^progress,' 



274 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

i 

protesting loudly that every one of your books is 
a bitter satire on Huxley, his congeners, and his 
disciples. The man tells me that no scientific 
papers in England will print his writing, merely 
from personal enmity. He has also quarrelled 
with the scientific societies of France, and now, 
being a polyglot, he writes for Spain and Ger- 
many — the only two countries in Europe where 
scientific impartiality is to be found." 

In another letter of his he says : "By the bye, 
an English paper states that Henley died worth 
something more than eight hundred pounds." 
One might imagine that he would then proceed j 
to condole with him on having had so little to 
leave, but that was not our Maitland. He went 
on: "Amazing! How on earth did he amass 
that wealth? I am rejoiced to know that his lat- 
ter years have been passed without struggle for 
bread." 

The long letter about the Roman Empire and 
Roman law from which I quoted in the last 
chapter, was dated August 6, 1903, and I did not 
hear again from Maitland until November i. I 
had written to him proposing to pay another visit 
to the south-west of France in order to see him 
in his Pyrenean home, but he replied very gloom- 
ily, saying that he was in evil case, that Therese 
had laryngitis, and that everything was made 
worse by incredibly bad weather. The work- 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 275 

house — still the workhouse — was staring him in 
the face. He had to labour a certain number of 
hours each day in direly unfavourable conditions. 
If he did not finish his book at the end of the 
year sheer pauperdom would come upon him. 
In these circumstances I was to see that he 
dreaded a visit from any friend, indeed he was 
afraid that they would not be able to stay in St. 
Christophe on account of its excessive dampness. 
According to this pathetically exaggerated ac- 
count they lived in a thick mist day and night. 
How on earth it came to be thought that such a 
dreadful country was good for consumptive peo- 
ple he could not imagine; though he owned, 
somewhat grudgingly, that he himself had got a 
good deal of strength there. He told me that 
as soon as the eternal rain ceased they were going 
down to Bayonne to see a doctor, and if he did 
no good Therese would go to the south of France. 
Finally, he was hanged if he knew how it would 
be managed. He ended up with: ^'In short I 
have not often in my life been nearer to an ap- 
palling crisis." At the end of this dismal letter, 
which did not affect me so much as might be 
thought, he spoke to me of my book, ^^Rachel," 
and said: *'I have been turning the pages with 
great pleasure to keep my thoughts from the 
workhouse." 

As I have hinted, those will have gathered 



276 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

very little of Maitland who imagine that I took 
this au pied de lettre. Maitland had cried 
"Wolf!" so often, that I had almost ceased to 
believe that there were wolves, even in the 
Pyrenees. All things had gradually become ap- 
palling crises and dreadful disasters. A mere 
disturbance and an actual catastrophe were alike 
dire and irremediable calamities. And yet, alas, 
there was more truth underlying his words than 
even he knew. If a man lives for ever in shadow 
the hour comes at last when there is no more 
light; and even for those who look forward, one 
would think with a certain relief, to the work- 
house, there comes a day that they shall work no 
more. I smiled when I read this letter, but, of 
course, telegraphed to him deferring my visit 
until the rain had ceased, or laryngitis had de- 
parted from his house, or until his spirits recov- 
ered their tone on the completion of his great 
romance. One could do no other, much as I 
desired to see him and have one of our prodigious 
and preposterously long talks in his new home. 
I do not think that I wrote to him after this la- 
mentable reply of his, but on November i6 I re- 
ceived my last communication from him. It 
was three lines on a post-card, still dated from 
St. Christophe. He referred in it once more to 
my book, and said: "Delighted to see the 
advertisement in to-day, especially after 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 277 

their very base notice last week. Hurrah ! Ill- 
ness and struggle still going on here." The 
struggle I believed in, but, as ever with one's 
friends, one doubted if the illness were serious. 
And yet the catastrophe was coming. 

At this time I was myself seriously ill. A 
chronic disease which had not been diagnosed 
resulted in a more or less serious infection of 
my own lungs, and, if I recollect truly, I had 
been in bed for nearly a fortnight. During the 
early days of my convalescence I went down to 
my club, and there one afternoon got this tele- 
gram from Rivers: "Have received following 
telegram from Maitland, ^Henry dying. En- 
treat you to come. In greatest haste.' I cannot 
go, can you?" This message to me was dated 
Folkestone, where Rivers was then living. Now 
at this time I was feeling very ill and utterly un- 
fit to travel. I hardly knew what to do, but 
thought it best to go home and consult with my 
wife before I replied to Rivers. Anxious as she 
was to do everything possible for Maitland, she 
implored me not to venture on so long a jour- 
ney, especially as it was mid-winter, just at 
Christmas-time. If I had not felt really ill she 
would not have placed any obstacles in my path, 
of that I am sure. She would, indeed, have 
urged me to go. After a little reflection I there- 
fore replied to Rivers that I was myself very ill, 



278 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

but added that if he could not possibly go I 
would. At the same time I telegraphed to Mait- 
land, or rather to Therese, saying that I was ill, 
but that I would come if she found it absolutely 
necessary. I do not think I received any an- 
swer to this message, a fact one easily understands 
when one learns how desperate things really 
were; but on December 26 I got another tele- 
gram from Rivers. I found that he had gone 
to St. Christophe in spite of not being well. He 
wired to me: ^'No nurse. Nursing help may 
save Maitland. Come if possibly can. Am 
here but ill." Such an appeal could not be re- 
sisted. I went straight home, and showing this 
telegram to my wife she agreed with me that I 
ought to go. If Rivers was ill at St. Christophe 
it now seemed my absolute duty to go, whatever 
my own state of health. 

I left London that night by the late train, 
crossing to Paris by way of Newhaven and 
Dieppe in order that I might get at least three 
hours of rest in a recumbent position in the 
steamer, as I did not at that time feel justified in 
going all the way first class and taking a sleeper. 
I did manage to obtain some rest during the sea- 
passage, but on reaching Paris early in the morn- 
ing I felt exceedingly unwell, and at the Gare 
St.-Lazare found at that hour no means of ob- 
taining even a cup of coffee. I drove over to the 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 279 

Quai d'Orsay, and spent an hour or two in the 
coffee-room waiting for the departure of the ex- 
press to Bordeaux. Ill as I was, and full of anx- 
iety about Maitland, and now about Rivers, that 
journey was one long nightmare to me. I had 
not been able to take the Sud Express, and when 
at last, late in the evening, I reached Bayonne, I^ 
found that the last train to St. Christophe in its 
high Pyrenean valley had already gone hours be- 
fore my arrival. While I was on my journey I 
had again telegraphed from Morcenx to Rivers 
or to Therese asking them to telegraph to me at 
the Hotel du Commerce, Bayonne, in case I was 
unable to get on that night, as I had indeed 
feared, although I was unable to get accurate 
information. On reaching this hotel I found 
waiting for me a telegram, which I have now 
lost, that was somehow exceedingly obscure but 
yet portended disaster. That I expected the 
worst I know, for I telegraphed to my wife the 
news in code that Maitland was dying and that 
the doctor gave no hope. 

If I had been a rich man, or even moderately 
furnished with money on that journey, I should 
have taken a motor-car if it could have been 
obtained, and have gone on at once without wait- 
ing for the morning. But now I was obliged to 
spend the night in that little old-fashioned hotel 
in the old English city of Bayonne^ the city whose 



280 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

fortress bears the proud emblem "Nunquam 
polluta." I wondered much if I should yet see 
my old friend alive. It was possible, and I 
hoped. At any rate, he must know that I was 
coming and was near at hand if only he were yet 
conscious. How much I was needed I did not 
know till afterwards, for even as I was going 
south Rivers was once more returning to Paris 
on his homeward journey. As I learnt after- 
wards, he was far too unwell to stay. In the 
morning I took the first train to St. Christophe, 
passing Cambo, where Rostand, the poet, makes 
his home. On reaching the town where Mait- 
land lived I found no one waiting for me as I 
had expected; for, naturally enough, I thought 
it possible that unless Rivers were very ill he 
would be able to meet me. It was a cold and 
gloomy morning when I left the station. Tak- 
ing my bag in my hand, I hired a small boy to 
show me the house in which Maitland lived on 
the outskirts of the little Pyrenean town. This 
house, it seems, was let in flats, and the Mait- 
lands occupied the first floor. On entering the 
hall I found a servant washing down the stone 
flooring. I said to her, "Comment Monsieur se 
porte-t-il?" and she replied, '^Monsieur est 
mort." I then asked her where I should find the 
other Englishman. She answered that he had 
gone back to England the day before, and then 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 281 

took me upstairs and went in to tell Therese that 
I had come. 

I found her with her mother. She was the 
only woman who had given him any happiness. 
Now she was completely broken down by the 
anxiety and distress which had come upon her so 
suddenly. For indeed it seems that it had been 
sudden. Only four or five days ago Maitland 
had been working hard upon ''Basil," the book 
from which he hoped so much, and in which he 
believed so fervently. Then ft seems that he 
developed what he called a cold, some slight af- 
fection of the lungs which raised his temperature 
a little. Strangely enough he did not take the 
care of himself that he should have taken, or that 
care which I should have expected him to use, 
considering his curiously expressed nervousness 
about himself. By some odd fatality he became 
suddenly courageous at the wrong time, and went 
out for a walk in desperately bad weather. On 
the following day he was obviously very seri- 
ously ill, and sent for the doctor, who suspended 
judgment but feared that he had pneumonia. 
On the day succeeding this yet another doctor 
was called into consultation, and the diagnosis 
of pneumonia was confirmed without any doubt. 
But that was not, perhaps, what actually killed 
him. There was a very serious complication, 
according to Maitland's first physician, with 



282 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

whom I afterwards had a long conversation, 
partly through the intermediary of the nurse, 
an Englishwoman from Bayonne, who talked 
French more fluently than myself. He con- 
sidered that Maitland also had myocarditis. 
I certainly did not think, and do not think, that 
he was right in this. Myocarditis is rarely ac- 
companied with much or severe pain, while the 
anguish of violent pericarditis is often very 
great, and Maitland had suffered most atro- 
ciously. He was not now a strong man, not one 
with big reserves and powers of passive endur- 
ance, and in his agony he cried aloud for death. 

In these agonies there were periods of com- 
parative ease when he rested and was quiet, and 
even spoke a little. In one of these intermis- 
sions Therese came to him and told him that I 
was now actually on my w^y. There is no rea- 
son, I think, why I should not write what he 

said. It was simply, ^'Good old H ." By 

this time Rivers had gone; but before his de- 
parture he had, I understand, procured the 
nurse. The last struggle came early that morn- 
ing, December 28, while I was at the Bayonne 
hotel preparing to catch the early train. He 
died quietly just before dawn, I think at six 
o'clock. 

I was taken in to see Therese, who was still in 
bed, and found her mother with her. They 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 283 

were two desolate and lonely women, and I had 
some fears that Therese would hardly recover 
from the blow, so deeply did his death affect 
her. She was always a delicate woman, and 
came from a delicate, neurotic stock, as one 
could see so plainly in the elder woman. I did 
my best to say what one could say, though all 
that can possibly be said in such cases is nothing 
after all. There is no physic for grief but the 
slow, inevitable years. I stayed not long, but 
went into the other chamber and saw my dead 
friend. The bed on which he lay stood in a 
little alcove at the end of the room farthest from 
the window. I remember that the nurse, who 
behaved most considerately to me, stood by the 
window while I said farewell to him. He 
looked strangely and peculiarly intellectual, as 
so often happens after death. The final relaxa- 
tion of the muscles about his chin and mouth 
accentuated most markedly the strong form of 
the actual skull. Curiously enough, as he had 
grown a little beard in his last illness, it seemed 
to me that he resembled very strongly another 
English writer not yet dead, one whom nature 
had, indeed, marked out as a story-teller, but 
who lacked all those qualities which made Mait- 
land what he was. As I stood by this dead-bed 
knowing, as I did know, that he had died at 
last in the strange anguish which I was aware 



284 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

he had feared, it seemed to me that here was a 
man who had been born to inherit grief. He 
had never known pure peace or utter joy as even 
some of the very humblest know it. I looked 
back across the toilsome path by which he had 
come hither to the end, and it seemed to me 
that from the very first he had been doomed. 
In other times or some other age he might have 
had a better fate, but he was born out of his 
time and died in exile doubly. I put my hand 
upon his forehead and said farewell to him and 
left the room, for I knew that there was much 
to do and that in some way I had to do it. 

Therese was most anxious that he should not 
be buried in St. Christophe, of which she had 
conceived a natural horror. There was at this 
time an English clergyman in the village, the 
chaplain of the English church at St. Pee, about 
whom I shall have something to say later. 
With him I concerted what was to be done, and 
he obtained the necessary papers from the 
mairie. And all this time, across the road from 
the stone house in which Henry Maitland lay 
dead, I heard the sound of his coffin being made 
in the little carpenter's shop which stood there. 
When all was done that could be done, and 
everything was in order, I went to the little ho- 
tel and had my lunch all alone, and afterwards 
dined alone and slept that night in the same ho- 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 285 

tel. The next day, late in the afternoon, I went 
down to St. Pee d'Ascain in charge of his body. 
During this journey the young doctor who had 
attended Maitland accompanied me part of the 
way, and for the rest of it his nurse was my com- 
panion. At St. Pee dAscain, where it was then 
quite dark, we were received by the clergyman, 
who had preceded us, and by a hearse, into which 
we carried Maitland's body. I accompanied it 
to the English chapel, where it remained all 
night before the altar. I slept at my old hotel, 
where I was known, as I had stayed there at the 
time I last saw Maitland alive. 

In the morning a service was held for him ac- 
cording to the rites of the English Church. This 
was the desire of Therese and Madame Espinel, 
who, if it had been possible, I think would have 
desired to bury him according to the rites of the 
Catholic Church. Maitland, of course, had no 
orthodox belief. He refused to think of these 
things, for they were disturbing and led no- 
whither. Attending this service there were many 
English people, some who knew him, and some 
again who did not know him but went there out 
of respect for his name and reputation, and per- 
haps because they felt that they and he were alike 
in exile. We buried him in the common ceme- 
tery of St. Pee, a place not unbeautiful, nor un- 
beautifuUy situated. And while the service 



286 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

went on over his grave I v^as somehow reminded 
of the lovely cemetery at Lisbon where another 
English man of letters lies in a tomb far from 
his own country. I speak of Fielding. 

I left Therese and Madame Espinel still at St. 
Christophe, and did not see them again before I 
started for England. They, I knew, would 
probably return to Paris, or perhaps would go to 
relatives of theirs in Spain. I could help them 
no more, and by now I discovered that my win- 
ter journey, or perhaps even my short visit to the 
death-chamber of Henry Maitland, had given 
me some kind of pulmonary catarrh which in 
my overwrought and nervous state seemed likely, 
perhaps, to result in something more serious. 
Therefore, having done all that I could, and hav- 
ing seen him put in the earth, I returned home 
hurriedly. On reaching England I was very ill 
for many days, but recovered without any serious 
results. Soon afterwards some one, I know not 
who it was, sent me a paragraph published in a 
religious paper which claimed Maitland as a 
disciple of the Church, for it said that he had 
died '4n the fear of God's holy name, and with 
the comfort and strength of the Catholic faith." 
When some men die there are for ever crows and 
vultures about. Although I was very loath to 
say anything which would raise an angry dis- 
cussion, I felt that this could not be passed by 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 287 

and that he would not have wished it to be passed 
by. Had he not written of a certain character 
in one of his books '^that he should be buried as a 
son of the Church, to whom he had never be- 
longed, was a matter of indignation"? That 
others felt as I did is proved by a letter I got 
from his friend Edmund Roden, who wrote to 
me: "You have seen the report that the eccle- 
siastical buzzards have got hold of Henry Mait- 
land in articulo mortis and dragged him into the 
fold." 

My own views upon religion did not matter. 
They were stronger and more pronounced, and, 
it may be, more atheistical than his own. Never- 
theless I knew what he felt about these things, 
and in consequence wrote the following letter to 
the editor of the paper which had claimed him 
for the Church : "My attention has been drawn 
to a statement in your columns that Henry Mait- 
land died in communion with the Church of 
England, and I shall be much obliged if you will 
give to this contradiction the same publicity you 
granted, without investigation, to the calumny. 
I was intimate with Maitland for thirty years, 
and had every opportunity of noting his attitude 
towards all theological speculation. He not 
only accepted none of the dogmas formulated in 
the creeds and articles of the Church of England, 
but he considered it impossible that any Church's 



288 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

definition of the undefinable could have any sig- 
nificance for any intelligent man. During the 
whole of our long intimacy I never knew him to 
waver from that point of view. 

*What communication may have reached you 
from any one who visited Maitland during his 
illness I do not know. But I presume you do 
not maintain that a change in his theological 
standpoint can reasonably be inferred from any 
words which he may have been induced to speak 
in a condition in which, according to the law of 
every civilised country, he would have been in- 
competent to sign a codicil to his will. 

"The attempt to draw such a deduction will 
seem dishonest to every fair-minded man; and 
I rely upon your courtesy to publish this vin- 
dication of the memory of an honest and con- 
sistent thinker which you have, however uninten- 
tionally, aspersed." 

Of course this letter was refused publication. 
The editor answered it in a note in which he 
maintained the position that the paper had taken 
up, stating that he was thoroughly satisfied with 
the sources of his information. Naturally 
enough I knew what those sources were, and I 
wrote a letter in anger to the chaplain of St. Pee, 
which, I fear, was full of very gross insults. 

Seeing that the paper refused my letter admis- 
sion to its columns, on the advice of certain other 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 289 

people I wrote to a London daily saying: "As 
the intimate friend of Henry Maitland for thirty 
years, I beg to state definitely that he had not the 
slightest intellectual sympathy with any creed 
whatsoever. From his early youth he had none, 
save for a short period when, for reasons other 
than intellectual, he inclined to a vague and 
nebulous Positivism. His mental attitude to- 
wards all theological explanations was more than 
critical, it was absolutely indifferent; he could 
hardly understand how any one in the full pos- 
session of his faculties could subscribe to any 
formulated doctrines. No more than John 
Stuart Mill or Herbert Spencer could he have 
entered into communion with any Church." 

Of course I knew, as any man must know who 
is acquainted with humanity and its frailties, that 
it was possible for Maitland, during the last few 
poisoned hours of his life, to have gone back in 
his delirium upon the whole of his previous con- 
victions. He knew that he was dying. When 
he asked to know the truth he had been told it. 
In such circumstances some men break down. 
There are what people call death-bed repent- 
ances. Therefore I did my best to satisfy myself 
as to whether anything whatever had occurred 
which would give any colour to these theologic 
lies. I could not trouble Therese upon this par- 
ticular point, but it occurred to me that the nurse, 



290 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

who was a very intelligent woman, must be in a 
position to know something of the matter, and I 
therefore wrote to her asking her to tell me all 
she knew. She replied to me about the middle 
of January, telling me that she had just then had 
a long talk with Mrs. Maitland, and giving me 
the following facts. 

It appears that on Monday, December 21, 
Maitland was so ill that a consultation was 
thought necessary, and that both the doctors 
agreed that it was impossible for the patient to 
live through the night, though in fact he did not 
die till nearly a week afterwards. On Thursday, 
December 24, the chaplain was sent for, not for 
any religious reasons, or because Maitland had 
called for him, but simply because Therese 
thought that he might find some pleasure in see- 
ing an English face. When the clergyman came 
it did indeed have this eflfect, for Maitland's face 
lit up and he shook him heartily by the hand. 
At this moment the young doctor came in and 
told the clergyman privately that Maitland had 
no chance whatever, and that it was a wonder 
that he was still alive. It is quite certain that 
there was no religious conversation between the 
clergyman and the patient at this time. The 
nurse arrived at eleven o'clock on Sunday morn- 
ing, and insisted on absolute quietness in the 
room. The clergyman simply peeped in at the 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 291 

door to say good-bye, for at that time Mr. 
Rivers was in charge in the bedroom. 

The chaplain did not see Maitland again until 
the day I myself came to St. Christophe, when 
all was over. While Maitland was delirious it 
appears that he chanted some kind of Te Deum 
repeatedly. To what this was attributable no 
man can say with certainty, but it is a curious 
thing to reflect upon that ''Basil" was about the 
time of Gregory, and that Maitland had been 
studying most minutely the history of the early 
Church in many ecclesiastical works. Accord- 
ing to those who heard his delirious talk, it 
seems that all he did say had reference to 
''Basil," the book about which he had been so 
anxious, and was never to finish. At any rate 
it is absolutely certain that Maitland never ac- 
cepted the offices of the Church before his 
death, even in delirium. Before I leave this 
matter I may mention that the chaplain com- 
plicated matters in no small degree before he 
retired from the scene, by declaring most disin- 
genuously that he had not written the notice 
which appeared in print. Now this was per- 
fectly true. He did not write it. He had asked 
a friend of his to do so. When he learnt the 
truth this friend very much regretted having 
undertaken the task. I understand that though 
the editor refused to withdraw this statement 



292 



HENRY MAITLAND 



he authorities of the paper wrote to the chap- 
lain in no pleased spirit after they had received 
my somewhat severely phrased communication. 
gLdt:w1t^'^^^^^^^^^-"^i-.-dIam 



CHAPTER XIII 

FOR ever on looking backwards one is 
filled with regrets, and one thing I re- 
gret greatly about Henry Maitland is 
that, though I might perhaps have purchased 
his little library, the books he had accumulated 
with so much joy and such self-sacrifice, I never 
thought of this until it was too late. Books 
made up so much of his life, and few of his had 
not been bought at the cost of what others would 
consider pleasure, or by the sacrifice of some 
sensation which he himself would have enjoyed 
at the time. Now I possess none of his books 
but those he gave me, save only the little "An- 
thologia Latina" which Therese herself sent 
to me. This was a volume in which he took 
peculiar delight, perhaps even more delight 
than he did in the Greek anthology, which I 
myself preferred so far as my Greek would then 
carry me. Many times I have seen him take 
down the little Eton anthology and read aloud. 
Now I myself may quote : 

Animula vagula, blandula, 
Hospes comesque corporis. 



294 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

Qua nunc abibis in loca 
Pallidula, rigida, nudula 



I believe his library was sold in Paris, for 
now that Therese had no settled home it was 
impossible to carry it about with her. Among 
these books were all those beautifully bound 
volumes which he had obtained as prizes at 
Moorhampton College, and others which he had 
picked up at various times in the various book- 
shops of London, so many of which he speaks 
of in ^The Meditations" — his old Gibbon in 
quarto, and some hundreds of others chosen with 
joy because they appealed to him in a way only 
a book-lover can understand. He had a strange 
pleasure in buying old copies of the classics, 
which shows that he was perhaps after all more 
of a bookman than a scholar. He would per- 
haps have rather possessed such a copy of 
Lucretius as is on my own shelves, which has 
no notes but is wonderfully printed, than the 
newest edition by the newest editor. He was 
conscious that his chief desire was literature 
rather than scholarship. Few indeed there are 
who know the classics as well as he did, who 
read them for ever with so much delight. 

Maitland, for an Englishman, knew many 
languages. His Greek, though not extraordi- 
narily deep, was most familiar. He could read 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 295 

Aristophanes lying on the sofa, thoroughly en- 
joying it, and rarely rising to consult Liddell 
and Scott, a book which he adored in the most 
odd fashion, perhaps because it knew so much 
Greek. There was no Latin author whom he 
could not read fluently. I myself frequently 
took him up a difficult passage in Juvenal and 
Persius, and rarely, if ever, found him at fault, 
or slow to give me help. French he knew very 
nearly as well as a Frenchman, and spoke it very 
fluently. His Italian was also very good, and 
he spoke that too without hesitation. Spanish 
he only read ; I do not think he often attempted 
to speak it. Nevertheless he read ''Don Quix- 
ote" in the original; and his Italian can be 
judged by the fact that he read Dante's 
"Divina Commedia" almost as easily as he read 
his Virgil. German too was an open book to 
him, and he had read most of the great men who 
wrote in it, understanding even the obscurities 
of "Titan." I marked down the other day 
many of the books in which he chiefly delighted, 
or rather, let me say, many of the authors. 
Homer, of course, stood at the head of the list, 
for Homer he knew as well as he knew Shakes- 
peare. His adoration for Shakespeare was, in- 
deed, I think, excessive, but the less said of that 
the better, for I have no desire to express fully 
what I think concerning the general English 



296 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

over-estimation of that particular author. I do, 
however, understand how it was that Maitland 
worshipped him so, for whatever may be thought 
of Shakespeare's dramatic ability, or his char- 
acterisation, or his general psychology, there 
can be no dispute about his having been a mas- 
ter of ^'beautiful words." Milton he loved 
marvellously, and sometimes he read his sonnets 
to me. Much of ^'Lycidas" he knew by heart, 
and some of ^'11 Penseroso." Among the Latins, 
Virgil, Catullus, and TibuUus were his favour- 
ites, although he took a curious interest in 
Cicero, a thing in which I was never able to 
follow him. I once showed to Maitland in the 
^'Tusculan Disputations" what Cicero seemed 
to think a good joke. It betrayed such an ex- 
traordinary lack of humour that I was satisfied 
to leave the '^Disputations" alone henceforth. 
The only Latin book which I myself introduced 
to Maitland was the ^'Letters" of Pliny. They 
afterwards became great favourites with him 
because some of them dealt with his beloved 
Naples and Vesuvius. Lucian's "Dialogues" he 
admired very much, finding them, as indeed 
they are, always delightful ; and it was very in- 
teresting to him when I showed him to what 
extent Disraeli was indebted to Lucian in those 
clever jeux d'esprit ''Ixion in Heaven," 'Topa- 
nilla," and 'The Infernal Marriage." The 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 297 

"Golden Ass" of Apuleius he knew almost by 
heart. Petronius he read very frequently; it 
contained some of the actual life of the old 
world. He knew Diogenes Laertius very well, 
though he read that author, as Montaigne did, 
rather for the light he throws upon the private 
life of the Greeks than for the philosophy in the 
book; and he frequently dipped into Athenaeus 
the Deipnosophist. Occasionally, but very oc- 
casionally, he did read some ancient metaphysics, 
for Plato was a favourite of his — not, I think, on 
account of his philosophy, but because he wrote 
so beautifully. Aristotle he rarely touched, al- 
though he knew the 'Toetics." He had a pecul- 
iar admiration for the Stoic Marcus Aurelius, in 
which I never followed him because the Stoic 
philosophy is so peculiarly inhuman. But, after 
all, among the Greeks his chief joy was the tra- 
gedians, and there was no single play or frag- 
ment of ^schylus, Sophocles, and Euripides that 
he did not know almost by heart. Among the 
Frenchmen his great favourites were Rabelais 
and Montaigne and, later, Flaubert, Maupas- 
sant, Victor Hugo, Zola, Balzac, and the Gon- 
courts. As I have said before, he had a great 
admiration for the Russian writers of eminence, 
and much regretted that he did not know Rus- 
sian. He once even attempted it, but put it 
aside. I think Balzac was the only writer of 



298 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

importance that he read much of who did not 
possess a style; he owned that he found him on 
that account at times almost impossible to read 
Nevertheless he did read him, and learnt much 
from him; but his chief admiration among the 
French on the ground of their being artists was 
for Flaubert and Maupassant. Zola's style did 
not appeal to him ; in fact in many of his books it 
is little better than Balzac's. Maitland's love of 
beautiful words and the rhythms of prose was 
as deep as that of Meredith; and as I have said, 
his adoration of Shakespeare was founded on the 
fact that Shakespeare still remains the great en- 
chanter in the world of phrases. He read Eng- 
lish very deeply. There was little among the 
fields of English prose that he did not know 
well; but again he loved best those who had a 
noble style of their own, notably Sir Thomas 
Browne. If a man had something to say and did 
not say it well, Maitland read him with diffi- 
culty and held him at a discount. That is why 
he loved Landor at his best, why he loved Mere- 
dith, and why he often adored Hardy, especially 
in Hardy's earlier works, before he began to 
"rail at the universe" and disturb him. I think 
among other living writers of English fiction I 
can hardly mention more than one of whom he 
spoke with much respect, and he was Henry 
James. As he was a conservative he was espe- 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 299 

cially a conservative critic. He found it diffi- 
cult to appreciate anything which was wholly 
new, and the rising school of Celtic literature, 
which means much, and may mean more, in 
English literature, did not appeal to him greatly. 
He lived in the past, even in English, and often 
went back to Chaucer and drank at his well and 
at the everlasting fountain of Malory. So, as I 
have said, he loved old Walton. Boswell he read 
yearly at least, for he had an amazing admira- 
tion for old Johnson, a notable truth-teller. 
The man who could say what he thought, and 
say it plainly, was ever his favourite, although I 
could never induce him to admire Machiavelli, 
for the coldness of Machiavelli's intellect was a 
little too much for him. The pure intellect 
never appealed to Maitland. I think if he had 
attempted "The Critique of Pure Reason" he 
would have died before he had learnt Kant's 
vocabulary. Yet I once gave him a copy of it in 
the original. The only very modern writer that 
he took to was Walt Whitman, and the trouble 
I had in getting him to see anything in him was 
amazing, though at last he succumbed and was 
characteristically enthusiastic. 

What he wanted in literature was emotion, 
feeling, and humour — literature that affected 
him sensuously, and made him happy, and made 
him forget. For it is strange when one looks 



300 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

back at his books to think how much he loved 
pure beauty, though he found himself compelled 
to write, only too often, of the sheer brutality of 
modern civilisation and the foulest life of Lon- 
don. Of course he loved satire, and his own 
mind was essentially in some ways satiric. His 
greatest gift was perhaps that of irony, which he 
frequently exercised at the expense of his public. 
I remember very well his joy when something 
he had written which was ironically intended 
from the first word to the last was treated seri- 
ously by the critics. He was reminded, as he 
indeed reminded me, of Samuel Butler's "Fair- 
haven," that book on Christianity which was 
reviewed by one great religious paper as an 
essay in religious apologetics. This recalls to 
my mind the fact that I have forgotten to say 
how much he loved Samuel Butler's books, or 
those with which he was more particularly ac- 
quainted, "Erewhon" and "Erewhon Revisited." 
Anything which dug knives into the gross stu- 
pidity of the mass of English opinion afforded 
him the intensest gratification. If it attacked 
their religion or their vanity he was equally de- 
lighted, and when it came to their hypocrisy — 
in spite of the defence he made later in ''The 
Meditations" of English hypocrisy — he was 
equally pleased. In this connection I am re- 
minded of a very little thing of no particular 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 301 

importance which occurred to him when he was 
upon one occasion at the Royal Academy. That 
year Sir Frederick Leighton exhibited a very 
fine decorative panel of a nude figure. While 
Maitland was looking at it a typical English 
matron with three young flappers of daughters 
passed him. One of the girls stood in front of 
this nude and said, "Oh, mamma, what is this?" 
Whereupon her mother replied hurriedly, "Only 
a goddess, my dear, only a goddess! Come 
along, — only a goddess." And he quoted to 
himself and afterwards to me, from "Roman 
Women": "And yet I love you not, nor ever 
can. Distinguished woman on the Pincian!" If 
I remember rightly, the notable -address to Eng- 
lishwomen in T. E. Brown's poem was published 
separately in a magazine which I brought to 
him. It gave great occasion for chuckling. 

I have not attempted to give any far-reaching 
notion of all Maitland's reading, but I think 
what I have said will indicate not unfairly what 
its reach was. What he desired was to read the 
best that had been written in all western lan- 
guages ; and I think, indeed, that very few men 
have read so much, although he made, in some 
ways, but little use of it. Nevertheless this life 
among books was his true life. Among books 
he lived, and among them he would have died. 
Had any globe-trotting Gillman offered to show 



302 HENRY MAITLAND 

him the world, he would have declined, I think 
to leave the littoral of the Mediterranean,' 
though with a book-loving Gillman he migh 
have explored all literature. 



CHAPTER XIV 

THERE have been few men so persecuted 
by Fortune as to lead lives of unhappi- 
ness, lighted only by transient gleams of 
the sun, who are yet pursued beyond the grave 
by outcries and misfortune, but this was un- 
doubtedly the case with Maitland. Of course 
he always had notable ill luck, as men might say 
and indeed do say, but his ill luck sprang from 
his nature as well as from the nature of things. 
When a man puts himself into circumstances to 
which he is equal he may have misfortunes, or 
sometimes disasters, but he has not perpetual 
adversity. Maitland's nature was for ever 
thrusting him into positions to which he was not 
equal. His disposition, his very heredity, seems 
to have invited trouble. So out of his first great 
disaster sprang all the rest. He had not been 
equal to the stress laid upon him, and in later 
life he was never equal to the stress he laid upon 
himself. This is what ill luck is. It is an in- 
stinctive lack of wisdom. I think I said some 
chapters ago that I had not entirely disposed of 
the question of his health. I return to the sub- 

303 



304 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

ject with some reluctance. Nevertheless I think 
what I have to say should be said. It at any 
rate curiously links the last days of Maitland's 
life to the earlier times of his trouble, or so it 
will seem to physicians. I shall do no more 
than quote a few lines from a letter which he 
wrote to Lake. He says : "You remember that 
patch of skin disease on my forehead? Nothing 
would touch it; it had lasted for more than two 
years, and was steadily extending itself. At last 
a fortnight ago I was advised to try iodide of 
potassium. Result — perfect cure after week's 
treatment! I had resigned myself to being dis- 
figured for the rest of my life; the rapidity of 
the cure is extraordinary. I am thinking of 
substituting iodide of potassium for coffee at 
breakfast and wine at the other meals. I am 
also meditating a poem in its praise — which may 
perhaps appear in the Fortnightly Review/' 
Dr. Lake replied to these dithyrambs with a let- 
ter which Maitland did not answer. There is no 
need to comment upon this more particularly; 
it will at any rate be clear to those who are not 
uninstructed in medicine. 

His ill luck began early. It lasted even be- 
yond the grave. Some men have accounted it a 
calamity to have a biography written of them. 
The first who said so must have been English, 
for in this country the absence of biographic art 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 305 

is rendered the more peculiarly dreadful by the 
existence in our language of one or two master- 
pieces. In some ways I would very willingly 
cease to speak now, for I have written nearly all 
that I had in my mind, and I know that I have 
spoken nothing which would really hurt him. 
As I have said in the very first chapter, he had 
an earnest desire that if anything were written 
about him after his death it should be something 
true. Still there are some things yet to be put 
down, especially about ^'Basil" and its publica- 
tion. He left this book unfinished: it still 
lacked some few chapters which would have 
dealt with the final catastrophe. It fell to the 
executors to arrange for the publication of the 
incomplete book. As Maitland had left no 
money, certainly not that two thousand pounds 
which he vainly hoped for, there were still his 
children to consider; and it was thought neces- 
sary, for reasons I do not appreciate, to get a 
preface written for the book with a view, which 
seemed to me idle, of procuring it a great sale. 

It appears that Rivers offered to write this 
preface if it were wanted. What he wrote was 
afterwards published. The executors did not 
approve it, again for reasons which I do not ap- 
preciate, for I think that it was on the whole a 
very admirable piece of work. Yet I do not 
believe Rivers was sincere in the view he took 



306 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

of ^^Basil" as a work of art. In later years he' 
acknowledged as much to me, but he thought it; 
was his duty to say everything that could possi-. 
bly be said with a view of imposing it on a! 
reluctant public. The passage in this article 
mainly objected to was that which speaks ob- 
scurely of his early life at Moorhampton Col- 
lege and refers as obscurely to his initial great 
disaster. The reference was needed, and could 
hardly be avoided. Rivers said nothing openly 
but referred to '^an abrupt incongruous reaction 
and collapse." This no doubt excited certain 
curiosities in certain people, but seeing that so 
many already knew the truth, I cannot perceive 
what was to be gained by entire silence. How- 
ever, this preface was rejected and Mr. Harold 
Edgeworth was asked to write another. This 
he did, but it was a frigid performance. The 
writer acknowledged his ignorance of much that 
Maitland had written, and avowed his want of 
sympathy with most of it. 

Naturally enough, the trouble growing out of 
this dispute gave rise to considerable comment. 
As some theological buzzards had dropped out 
of a murky sky upon Maitland's corpse, so some 
literary kites now found a subject to gloat upon. 
Nevertheless the matter presently passed. 
"Basil," unhappily, was no success; and if one 
must speak the truth, it was rightly a failure. 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 307 

It is curious and bitter to think of that when he 
was dealing at the last in some kind of peace and 
quiet with his one chosen subject, that he had 
thought of for so many years and prepared for 
so carefully, it should by no means have proved 
what he believed it. There is, indeed, no such 
proof as "Basil" in the whole history of letters 
that the writer was not doing the work that his 
nature called for. Who that knows "Magna 
Graecia," and who, indeed, that ever spoke with 
him, will not feel that if he had visited one by 
one all the places that he mentions in the book, 
and had written about them and about the his- 
torical characters that he hoped to realise, the 
book might have been as great or even greater 
than the shining pages of "Magna Graecia"? 
It was in the consideration of these things, while 
reviving the aspects of the past that he felt so 
deeply and loved so much, that his native and 
natural genius came out. In fiction it was only 
when rage and anger and disgust inspired him 
that he could hope to equal anything of the pas- 
sion which he felt about his temperamental and 
proper work. Those books in which he let him- 
self go perfectly naturally, and those books 
which came out of him as a terrible protest 
against modern civilisation, are alone great. 
Yet it is hard to speak without emotion and with- 
out pain of "Basil." He believed in it so 



308 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

greatly, and yet believed in it no more than any 
writer must while he is at work. The artist's 
own illusion of a book's strength and beauty is 
necessary to any accomplishment. He must be- 
lieve with faith or do nothing. Maitland failed 
because it was not his real work. 

In one sense the great books of his middle 
period were what writers and artists know as 
"pot-boilers." They were, indeed, written for 
an actual living, for bread and for cheese and 
occasionally a very little butter. But they had 
to be written. He was obliged to do something, 
and did these best; he could do no other. He 
was always in exile. That was the point in my 
mind when I wrote one long article about him 
in a promising but passing magazine which 
preened its wings in Bond Street and died before 
the end of its first month. This article I called 
"The Exile of Henry Maitland." There is 
something of the same feeling in much that has 
been written of him by men perhaps qualified in 
many ways better than myself had they known 
him as well as I did. I have, I believe, spoken 
of the able criticism Thomas Sackville wrote of 
him in the foreword of the book of short stories 
which was published after Maitland's death. 
In the Fortnightly Review Edwin Warren wrote \ 
a feeling and sympathetic article about him. 
Jacob Levy wrote not without discernment of 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 309 

the man. And of one thing all these men 
seemed tolerably sure, that in himself Maitland 
stood alone. But he only stood alone, I think, 
in the best work of his middle period. And 
even that work was alien from his native mind. 
In an early article written about him while he 
yet lived I said that he stood in a high and soli- 
tary place, because he belonged to no school, and 
most certainly not to any English school. No 
one could imitate, and no one could truly even 
caricature him. The essence of his best work 
was that it was founded on deep and accurate 
knowledge and keen observation. Its power lay 
in a bent, in a mood of mind, not by any means 
in any subject, even though his satiric discussion 
of what he called the 'ignobly decent" showed 
his strength, and indirectly his inner character. 
His very repugnance to his early subjects led 
him to choose them. He showed what he 
wished the world to be by declaring and proving 
that it possessed every conceivable opposite to 
his desires. I pointed out some time ago, but 
should like to insist upon it again, that in one 
sense he showed an instinctive affinity for the 
lucid and subtle Tourgeniev. There is no more 
intensely depressing book in the entire Eng- 
lish language than ^'Isabel." The hero's desires 
reached to the stars, but he was not able to steal 
or take so much as a farthing rushlight. Not 



310 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

even Demetri Roudine, that futile essence of 
futility, equals this, Maitland's literary child of 
bitter, unable ambitions. These Russians in- 
deed were the writers with whom Maitland had 
most sympathy. They moved what Zola had 
never been able to stir in him, for he was never 
a Zolaist, either in mind or method. No man 
without a style could really influence him for 
more than a moment. Even his beloved Balzac, 
fecund and insatiable, had no lasting hold upon 
him, much as he admired the man's ambitions, 
his unparalleled industry, his mighty construc- 
tion. For Balzac was truly architectonic, even 
if barbarous, and though these constructions of 
his are often imaginary and his perspectives a 
mystery. But great construction is obviously 
alien from Maitland. He wanted no elaborate 
architecture to do his thinking in. He would 
have been contented in a porch, or preferably in 
a cloister. 

I have declared that his greatest book is *'The 
Exile" — I mean his greatest book among his 
novels. To say it is a masterpiece is for once 
not to abuse the word; for it is intense, 
deeply psychological, moving, true. ^^Uana- 
tomia presuppone il cadavere^' says Gabriele 
D'Annunzio, but "The Exile" is intolerable and 
wonderful vivisection. Yet men do bleed and 
live, and the protagonist in this book — in much. 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 311 

in very much, Henry Maitland — ^bleeds but will 
not die. He was born out of the leisured classes 
and resented it with an incredible bitterness, 
with a bitterness unparalleled in literature. I 
know that on one occasion Maitland spoke to me 
with a certain joy of somebody who had written 
to him about his books and had selected '^The 
Exile'^ as the greatest of them. I think he knew 
it was great. It was, of course, an ineffable fail- 
ure from the commercial point of view. 

On more than one occasion, as it was known 
that I was acquainted with Maitland, men asked 
me to write about him. I never did so without 
asking his permission to do it. This happened 
once in 1895. ^^ answered me: "What ob- 
jection could I possibly have, unless it were that 
I should not like to hear you reviled for log- 
rolling? But it seems to me that you might well 
write an article which would incur no such 
charge; and indeed, by so doing, you would 
render me a very great service. For I have in 
mind at present a careful and well-written at- 
tack in the current Spectator. Have you seen 
it? Now I will tell you what my feelings are 
about this frequent attitude in my critics." 

Maitland's views upon critics and reviewing 
were often somewhat astounding. He resented 
their folly very bitterly. Naturally enough, we 
often spoke of reviewers, for both of us, in a 



312 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

sense, had some grievances. Mine, however, 
v^ere not bitter. Luckily for me, I sometimes 
did v^ork v^hich appealed more to the general, 
w^hile his appeal w^as alw^ays to the particular. 
Apropos of a review of one of Rivers' books he 
says: ^'I have also, unfortunately, seen the 
. Now, can you tell me (in moments of ex- 
treme idleness one wishes to know such things) 
who the people are who review fiction for the 

? Are they women, soured by celibacy, 

and by ineffectual attempts to succeed as 
authors? Even as they treat you this time they \ 
have consistently treated me — one continuous 
snarl and sneer. They are beastly creatures — I 
can think of no other term." 

It was unfortunate that he took these things so 
seriously, for nobody knows so well as the re- 
viewers that their work is not serious. Yet, ac- 
cording to them the general effect of Maitland's 
books, especially "Jubilee," was false, mislead- 
ing, and libellous ; and was in essence caricature. 
One particular critic spoke of "the brutish stupe- 
faction of his men and women," and said, "his 
realism inheres only in his rendering of detail." 
Now Maitland declared that the writer ex- 
hibited a twofold ignorance — first of the life he 
depicted, and again of the books in which he 
depicted it. Maitland went on to say: "He 
— the critic — speaks specially of 'Jubilee,' so for 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 313 

the moment we will stick to that. I have se- 
lected from the great mass of lower middle-class 
life a group of people who represent certain of 
its grossnesses, weaknesses, &c., peculiar to our 
day. Now in the first place, this group of peo- 
ple, on its worst side, represents a degradation 
of which the critic has obviously no idea. In 
the second place, my book, if properly read, con- 
tains abundant evidence of good feeling and 
right thinking in those members of the group 
who are not hopelessly base. Pass to instances: 
*The seniors live a . . . life unglorified by a 
single fine emotion or elevating instinct.' In- 
deed? What about Mr. Ward, who is there 
precisely to show that there can be, and are, 
these emotions and instincts in individuals? Of 
the young people (to say not a word about 
Nancy, at heart an admirable woman) , how is it 
possible to miss the notes of fine character in 
poor Halley? Is not the passionate love of 
one's child an ^elevating instinct'? nor yet a fine 
emotion? Why, even Nancy's brother shows 
at the end that favourable circumstances could 
bring out in him gentleness and goodness." 

There indeed spoke Maitland. He felt that 
everything was circumstance, and that for nine 
hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand cir- 
cumstance was truly too much, as it had been 
for him. It appears that the critic added that 



314 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

the general effect of the book was false; and 
Maitland replied that it would be so to a very 
rapid skimmer of the book, precisely as the gen- 
eral effect upon a rapid observer of the people 
themselves would be false. He was enraged to 
think that though people thought it worth while 
to write at length about his books, they would 
not take the trouble to study them seriously. 
He added: ''In this section of the lower mid- 
dle class the good is not on the surface; neither 
will it be found on the surface of my narrative." 
In this letter he went on to say something more 
of his books in general. Apropos of a para- 
graph written by Mr. Glass about his work as 
a whole, he said: "My books deal with people 
of many social strata ; there are the vile working 
class, the aspiring and capable working class, 
the vile lower middle, the aspiring and capable 
lower middle, and a few representatives of the 
upper middle class. My characters range from 
the vileness of Arry Parson to the genial and 
cultured respectability of Mr. Comberbatch. 
There are books as disparate as 'The Under 
World' and The Unchoicn.' But what I de- 
sire to insist upon is this, that the most character- 
istic, the most important, part of my work is that 
which deals with a class of young men distinctive 
of our time — well-educated, fairly bred, but 
without money. It is this fact, as I gather from 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 315 

reviews and conversation, of the poverty of my 
people which tells against their recognition as 
civilised beings. 'Oh/ said some one to Butler, 
*do ask Mr. Maitland to make his people a little 
better off.' There you have it." 

And there one has also the source of Mait- 
land's fountain of bitterness. He went on to 
say: "Now think of some of these young men, 
Hendon, Gif^ford, Medwin, Pick, Early, Hill- 
ward, Mallow. Do you mean to say that books 
containing such a number of such men deal, first 
and foremost, with the commonplace and the 
sordid? Why, these fellows are the very re- 
verse of commonplace; most of them are mar- 
tyred by the fact of possessing uncommon en- 
dowments. Is it not so? This side of my 
work, to me the most important, I have never 
yet seen recognised. I suppose Glass would 
class these men as 'at best genteel, and not so 
very genteel.' Why, 'ods bodikins ! there's noth- 
ing in the world so hateful to them as gentility. 
But you know all this, and can you not write of 
it rather trenchantly? I say nothing about my 
women. That is a moot point. But surely 
there are some of them who help to give colour 
to the groups I draw." The end of the letter 
was : ''I write with a numbed hand. I haven't 
been warm for weeks. This weather crushes 
me. Let me have a line about this letter." 



316 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

The sort of poverty which crushed the aspir- 
ing is the keynote to the best work he did. He 
knew it, and was right in knowing it. He 
played all these parts himself. In many pro- 
tean forms Maitland himself is discerned under 
the colour and character of his chosen names; 
and so far as he depicted a class hitherto un- 
touched, or practically untouched, in England, 
as he declares, he was a great writer of fiction. 
But he was not a romantic writer. There were 
some books of romance he loved greatly. We 
often and often spoke of Murger's ''Vie de 
Boheme." I do not think there was any passage 
in that book which so appealed to him as when 
Rodolphe worked in his adventitious fur-coat in 
his windy garret, declaring genially: "Main- 
tenant le thermometre va etre furieusement 
vexe." Nevertheless, as I have said before, he 
knew, and few knew so well, the very bitter truth 
that Murger only vaguely indicated here and 
there in scattered passages. In the ''Vie de 
Boheme" these characters "range" themselves at 
last; but mostly such men did not. They went 
under, they died in the hospital, they poisoned 
themselves, they blew out their brains, they sank 
and became degraded parasites of an uncompre- 
hending bourgeoisie. 

I spoke some time back of the painful hour 
when Maitland came to me to declare his con- 



OF HENRY MAITLAND 317 

sidered opinion that I myself could not write 
successful fiction. It is an odd thing that I 
never returned the compliment in any way, for 
though I knew he could, and did, write great fic- 
tion, I knew his best work would not have been 
fiction in other circumstances. Out of martyr- 
dom may come great things, but not out of 
martyrdom spring the natural blossoms of the 
natural mind. That he lived in the devil's twi- 
light between the Dan of Camberwell and the 
Beersheba of Camden Town, when his natural 
; environment should have been Italy, and Rome, 
I or Sorrento, is an unfading tragedy. Only once 
or twice in his life did a spring or summer come 
to him in which he might grow the flowers he 
loved best and knew to be his natural destiny. 
The greatest tragedy of all, to my mind, is that 
final tragedy of ''Basil" where at last, after long 
years of toil in fiction while fiction was yet neces- 
sary to his livelihood, he was compelled by his 
training to put into the form of a novel a theme 
not fit for such treatment save in the hands of a 
native and easy story-teller. 

I have said nothing, or little except by impli- 
cation, of the man's style. In many ways it was 
notable and even -noble. To such a literary in- 
telligence, informed with all the learning of the 
past towards which he leant, much of his style 
was inevitable ; it was the man and his own. For 



318 THE PRIVATE LIFE 

the greater part it is lucid rather than sparkling, 
clear, if not cold; yet with a subdued rhythm, 
the result of much Latin and more Greek, for 
the metres of the Greek tragedies always inspired 
him with their noble rhythms. Though he was 
often cold and bitter, especially in his employ- 
ment of irony, of which he is the only complete 
master in English literature except Samuel But- 
ler, he could rise to heights of passionate descrip- 
tion ; and here and there a sense of luxury tinges 
his words with Tyrian purple — and this in spite 
of all his sense of restraint, which was more 
marked than that of almost any living writer. 

When I think of it all, and consider his partly 
wasted years, I even now wonder how it was he 
induced himself to deal with the life he knew so 
well ; but while that commercialism exists which 
he abhorred as much as he abhorred the society 
in which it flourishes, there seems no other prac- 
ticable method for a man of letters to attain 
speech and yet to live. I often declared that 
fiction as we wrote it was truly diagnostic of a 
disordered and unnecessarily degraded form of 
civilisation; and he replied with deep feeling 
that to him the idylls of Theocritus, of Moschus, 
the simple tragedies, the natural woes and joys 
of men who ploughed the soil or worked at the 
winepress, were the truest and most vivid forms 
and subjects of Art. Neither before his death 



HENRY MAITLAND 319 

nor after did he attain the artist's true and great 
reward of recognition in the full sense that 
would have satisfied him even if he had re- 
mained poor. Nevertheless there were some 
who knew. There are perhaps a few more who 
know now that he is gone and cannot hear them. 
Popularity he never hoped for, and never will 
attain, but he has a secure place in the hierarchy 
of the literature of England which he loved. 
But he appeals now, as he appealed while he 
lived, not to the idle and the foolish, not to the 
fashionable mob, but to the more august tribunal 
of those who have the sympathy which comes 
from understanding. 



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